University of Alberta

Alice Walker: A Litemy Genealogist by Paege Alessandra Moore

A thesis submitted to the Facdty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulfillment of the requirernents of the degree of Master of Arîs

Department of English

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It should be the hture you want.

-01% The Temple of My Familiar by Nice Waker This dissertation is dedicated to Sputnik who insisted 1 remain at my desk. Table of Contents

Introduction ...... 1

Chapter 1 : Alice Waikefs Creative and Literary Geneaiogy ...... 3 Chapter 2: Their Eyes Were Watching God and The Color Purple ...... 52 Chapter 3: Mice Walker's Possessing the Secret of Joy: A Healing ...... 78 Notes ...... 128 Works Cited ...... 130 Works Consuited ...... 139 Introduction

The focus of this thesis is to examine Alice Walkefs novel Possessing the Secret of Joy within the constnicts of an established Afncan American literary Walker quotes musician Stevie Wonder in the epigraph to The Color Purple:

Show me how to do Iike you Show me how to do if. (Waiker, -Color ii) This simple lyric reveals the circular nature of Waker's perspective. Walker is Uiterested in the inter-connectedness of the universe and the ways in which her ancestors-familial and literary-are models for her life and writing. She connects herself, first and foremost, to the Afncan Amencan literary tradition and claims her mother and Zora Neale Humon as her primary models for her own creative and literary endeavors. Hurston's experiences of poverty, racism, and sexism as a struggling early twentieth century Afiican Amencan woman &ter inspired Waker to persevere and overcome the obstacles she was faced with: poverty, racism, and the physical wounding of her eye. The character Janie Crawford in Their Eyes Were Watching God provides a mode1 for Walker's female characten. Additionally, Hurston's fictional writing about the economics of acan Amencan women's oppression by men opened the door for Walker to do the same with her characten. Walker draws on the precedent set by Hurston; as a result, similar themes reappear in Walker's work, including: the use of ecanAmencan vemacular; focus on women's roles within the Afncan American community; female sexuality within the context of women's achievement of personal growth? individuation, and the desire for control over their sexual and physical selves. The protagonists of Their Eyes Were Watching God, The Color Purple, and Possessing the Secret of Joy dl ultimately reject patriarchy and connect with a commwity of women in order to escape patriarchy and achieve seifhood. Janie Crawford overcomes poverty and marital abuse to become a financially and sexuaily independent Afkican American woman. Following in Hurston's footsteps, Walker's femaie characters provide vehicles by which Waker cm expound her womanist views and rail against patriarchal oppression. Celie provides a vehicle by which to argue agahst child abuse, incest, and marital abuse in The Color Purple. Having established a context within which to discuss female sexuality, Waiker broadens her fiame of reference fiorn acan American women to include African women as well and, dtimately, women worldwide. Tashi's experience of femde genital mutilation in Possessing the Secret of Joy enables Walker to express her views about the physical and psychic devastation that occurs in women who are subject to this ancient patriarchai rihial. nie anger expressed by Janie, Celie, and Tashi gives them the strength to resist the sûmglehold of patriarchy; udominately, anger is expressed at the risk of the three women sinking into or stniggling against various forms of madness. In her writing, Walker establishes a community of women within which her characten cm sunive, heal their physical and psychic wounds, and achieve selfhood. Her larger political and social agenda is to create a cornmunity of women arnongst her readers and a means by which female genital mutilation and other abuses of women cm be eradicated on a global scale. By modeling her life and her writing on her creative and literary ancestors, W&er has created a fkmework whereby her readers and hture writers may see her life and writing as a mode1 for their own. Thus, like Nenie in The Color Purple, she and, she hopes, her readers "will be working for a common goal: the uplift of black people everywhere" (Walker, Color 143). Chapter 1:

Alice Walker's Creative and Literary Genealogy

There are those who believe Black people possess the secret of joy and that it is this that wiU sustain them through any spiritual or moral or physical devastation. --Mice Waiker, Possessing the Secret of Joy iii

Alice Walker identifies heaelf primarily as an Atiican American woman situated within ecanAmerican cdture; it is for this reason that she chooses Aftican Arnencan women as her main role models. Perhaps her poem "In These Dissenting Times" best expresses the importance that acknowledging one's geneaiogical, literary, and creative ancestors has for Waiker:

To acknowledge Our ancestors means we are mare that we did not make ourselves, that the Zine stretches ail the way back. perhups. to God; or to Go& We remember them because it is an easy thing toforget: that we are not theftrst to suffer, rebel, fight. love and die. The grace with which we embrace life, in spite of the pain, the sorrows, is always a measure of what hagone before. (Walker, Her Blue Body 155)

Although she identifies herself rnost closely with African Arnencan culture and Afncan Amencan women, Walker envisions the body of literature as one immense story written fiom a multitude of perspectives by writers fiom just as many different cultures. Waiker often expresses admiration for writen fiom cultures other than her own, but, for the 3 purposes of this study, I will focus attention on Afiican Amencan and white fernale writers fiom the Amencan South. In "Savllig the Life That 1s Your O-" Waiker writes that both Kate Chopin's The Awakening and Zora Neale Humon's Their Eyes Were Watching God are "indispensable to my own growth, my own life" (Walker, In Search 7). This is because, for Walker, the fundamentai difference (if there is one) between white and Afi-ican American writers is less important than the different perspectives white and African Amencan writers hold on various subjects:

It is not the difference between them that interests me, but, rather, the way black wrïters and white writers seem to me to be writing one immense story-the same story, for the most part-with different parts of this immense story cotning fiom a multitude of different perspectives. (Walker, In Search 5) Thus, Walker's interest lies in trying to piece together the different pieces of the pde that form the whole story:

Well, 1 believe that the mith about any subject only cornes when ail the sides of the story are put together, and al1 their different meanings make one new one. Each writer writes the missing parts to the other writer's story. And the whole story is what I'm after. (Walker, In Search 48-49)

Nonetheless, Waker finds that it is impossible to "completely identiQ" with white literatwe because it represents a culture which is not her own. Walker's early upbringing and education did not provide her with any African Arnerican women role models for her to look to as guides in her own development as an Anican American woman writer. Naturally, her discovery of Zora Neale Hurston, the most prolific Afiican Amencan woman writer of her tirne, author of "four novels, two books of foklore, an auto biography, numerous stories, articles, and plays," had a profound effect on Walker's life and writings (Washington, "Zora Neaie Hurston" 8).

Her feelings of connection with Hurston's life and her work are significant as, up to this point for Walker, her only models had ken deAfrican Arnerican Mters and writers from the dominant culture, that is, white writers. Although Walker is willing to glean what she perceives as valuable nom these writings, it is her comection with Zora Nede Hurston that solidifies in her mind the establishment of and the importance of an Mcan American literary tradition written by women. The basis for my study is literary and creative genealogy and its impact on Walker's work; therefore, it is important to give some attention to the early and primarily male Afiican American literary tradition out of which the female Afiican American tradition arose. Following this brief examination of early Afncan American Iiterary history, 1 will examine Walker's development as a writer, including the impact Zora Neale Hurston had on her life and her work, in order to more fully understand the literary tradition in which Walker locates herself. Walker's iiterary history is grounded in the history of slave literature, in the writings of both African slaves and emancipated Afncan Americans. This literature celebrates the attainment of personal, physical and intellectual freedom of the Anican Amencan people through emancipation as a whole as well as the personal fieedom of the Afiican American individual. William L. Andrews offers a succinct explication of the early development of the A6rican American novel in his essay "The 1850s: The First

Afro-Amencan Literary Renaissance," beginning with the fugitive-slave narrative. This earliest fom of Afiican Amencan writing has its ancestry in the "Protestant spiritual autobiography and conversion narrative, the captiviw narrative, and travel writing genres" of the eighteenth century ("1850s" 39). Andrews argues that the early slave narrative adopted a "Christian perspective in which the slave pictures hirnself as a pilgrim passing through a world of sin and suffering" using only "'honest means' to end

@s or her] physical bondage to slavery" (" 1850s" 40). nie abolitionkt movement of the early nineteenth century saw only iimited progress in its efforts to achieve freedom and equality for African Americans even after the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863. Thus, the fieedom movement became more militant and there was a move towards more "'un-Christian' means of becomhg free" (Andrews, " 1850s" 40). The Emancipation Proclamation did not apply to many of the Southern States, so it became common pmctice for slaves to use whatever means, legal or otherwise, to flee their owners in the hope of hding &dom in the

North. The individuals, African Amencan and white, who took it upon themselves to assist in this illegal migration of slaves became known as The Underground Railroad.

One of the best known female abolitionists was Haniet Tubman, who fled to the North when she was twenty-five: "Freedom felt so good that Harriet Tubman returnsd to the South nineteen times and brought out more than three hundred slaves" (Bennett, Mayflower 167). It was during this penod of militant abolitionism, characterized by Tubman's efforts, that the fugitive-slave narrative developed. It was used primarily as propaganda by the abolitionist movement to reveal the facts of slavery to an unsympathetic white public. As dissemination of the facts of slavery was foremost in the minds of non- abolitionist publishen and editon, the authors of these fugitive-slave narratives were discouraged fIom expressing their opinions about those facts. One such instance of white over-writhg of Afncan American authorship is A Bnef Account of the Life, Experïences, Travels, and Gospel Labors of George White, An Afncan. Written By Himself and Revised by a Friend (1 8 10) (Sekora and Baker, " Written Off'' 43). Authors such as Frederick Douglass, who wrote one of the better known fugitive-slave narratives, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845), felt stifled by the restrictions put on the genre. DougIass concluded bt, "[ilt did not entirely satisfy me to narrate wrongs; I felt Iike denomcing them. . . . Besides, 1 was growing [imtellectually], and needed room" (Bennett, Mayflower 157). The development and expansion of Afncan American literature into previously unoccupied temtones are clear in the works of William Wells Brown. Brown begm his literary career with a traditionally styled slave narrative titied The Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave (1847). Following this effort, Brown's horizons expanded with a trip to Europe, the product of which was his travel book, Three Years in Europe (1 852), the first non-slave narrative written by an Mcan American man. Thus, Brown was the first Afncan American author to make the inteIiectua1 leap nom slave narrative, where his subject and his exploration of it were restncted by abolitionist politics, to a genre where he had fiee reign to choose and write about his subject in his desued style. Brown's intellectual and literary growth did not stop there. In Clotel; or, The President's Daughter (1853), his next book, Brown managed to weave together a mesh of objective facts about slavery as well as "subjective interpretation of the country's myths and symbols" (Andrews, " 1850s" 47). Brown typecast Thomas Jefferson (a slave owner who had at least four children by one of his female slaves, Sally Hemings) as a stereotypical Democrat and then debunked him as a hypocrite for writing the Declmtion of Independence (July 4, 1776), which declared that, in theory, "ail men are created equal," but which, in practice, failed to include Afncan Arnericans in its defmition. By casting Jefferson, a prominent political leader, as an archetype of white injustice toward African Americans, Brown implicated al1 whites who thought and behaved in a sunilar fashion. Brown and Frank J. Webb, the ecan American author of The Garies and Their Friends (1 857), were two of a nurnber of African Arnerican writes instrumental in "enlarging the boundanes of the Afro-Amencan fictive world, and shedding the point of view of the traditional Afro-American narrative voice, that of the untutored ex-slave fiom the South" (Andrews, " 1850s" 47). Still rnissing fiom the Anican Amencan literary world was a "black nationalistic culture hero" whom other AfÎican Amencans could look to, identiQ with and be inspired by (Andrews, "1850s" 48). Martin R. Delany filled this gap with Blake; or the Huts of Amenca (1859). The protagonist of this serially published novel becomes a fugitive slave, but, instead of seeking fieedom in the North as one would expect, he "chooses instead to seek a higher ideal, the spiritual edightenment of his fellow slave as preparation for their eventual revolt" (Andrews, "1850s" 49). Knowledge is the key to spintuai fkeedom as Delany sees it and, once achieved, spirîtual freedom is but a stepping stone to physical fieedom through mass revolt. This theme of empowerment as a reaction to the oppression of slavery and racism through the attainment of knowledge nuis through the rest of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century with the exception of Booker T. Washington. 1 Washington, author of Up From Slavery (1901), negates the historical past of Afncan Americans before slavery and claims the beginning of slavery as the beginning of the growth and development of the Afiican Amencan people through oppohties provided in the Americas (freeing whites fiom the responsibility of enslaving and oppressing a race). Convenely, W. E. B. Du Bois, in his collection of essays titled -The Souk of Black Folk (1903), reclaims that histoncal past. Rather than starting at the point of enslavement with a tabuln rasa, or blank slate, on which to inscnbe the future of ficm Amencans as did Washington, Du Bois' attitude toward slavery reflects his sense of connection with pre-slavery Africans. Du Bois had a clear mental image of "the mind of the black, both in Afnca and as a slave brought to the New World" (qtd. in Rampersad, "Slavery" 11 5). He writes,

Endowed with a nch tropical imagination . . . and a keen, delicate appreciation of Nature, the transplanted African lived in a world animate with gods and devils, elves and witches; full of strange influences,-of Good to be implore4 of Evil to be propitiated. Slavery, then, was to him the dark triurnph of Evil over him. Al1 the fateful powen of the Underworld were striving against him, and a spirit of revolt and revenge filled his heart. (qtd. in Rampenad, "Slavery" 115) It was this sense of a uniquely valuable historical past prior to slavely, as well as the experience of slavery itself, which inspired Anican American men and women to continue to fight aga* oppression and to çtrive for independence in al1 areas of life.

Repatriation to Afnca was suggested at various times by whites, who wanted to be nd of Afiican Arnericans der slavery was abolished, as well as by Afirican Americans, who were tired of the ritual abuse, racism, and discrimination. Regardless, Afiican American culture grew out of the forced emigration nom Wca to America where Afncan Americans were enslaved for centuries. As Amiri Baraka notes, slaves were "not moving alone. Their goals must be won on three levels: fieedom of the body, fieedom of the mind and spirit, and fieedom for the whole Negro people" ("Black Literature" 28). The acan Arnerican struggle for identity is ongoing as African Amencans try to fmd their place in a society that designated theV place as subse~entto that of those who brought them to America. This decision to clah African American history, before, during, and after slavery, and to accept its implications and consequences, good and bad, stayed with Afncan American artists fiom the first fican Arnencan Literary Renaissance of the 18 50s into the Harlem Renaissance of the early twentieth cenw. Alain Locke's 1925 essay, "The New Negro," discusses the sociological consequences of "'the tide of Negro migration, northward, and city-ward"':

Where once there were persona1 and intimate relations, in which individuals were in contact at practically dl points of their lives, there are now group relations in which the whole structure is broken up and reassorted . . . There is a racial as weI1 as social disorientation. (qtd. in Lenz, "Southem Exposures" 85-86)

This feeling of disorientation resulted fkom the deterioration of culturai traditions which were much more solidly embedded in the closely knit communities of the South than in the discomected Afncan American communities fomed by individuals who migrated to the North. Desire to preserve the Anican Amencan cultural traditions of the South prompted a movement in the arts toward the creation of an African Amencan aesthetic. James Weldon Johnson attempted to define the requirements of such an aesthetic

The colored poet in the United States needs . . . to find a fom that will express the racial spirit by syrnbols fiom within rather than by symbols fiom without, such as the mere mutilation of English spelling and pronunciation. He needs a form that is fker and larger than dialect, but which will still hold the racial flavor; a fom expressing imagery, the idiorns, the peculiar turn of thought, and the distinctive humor and pathos, too, of the Negro, but which wiil also be capable of voicing the deepest and highest emotions and aspirations, and allow of the widest range of subjects and the widest scope of treatment. (qtd. in Lenz, "Southem Exposures" 87-8 8) Johnson's view on the value of African American vernacular in Afkican American writing is Merexplicated and cnticized in Frantz Fanon's discussion of this cultural phenornenon in his classic text, Black Skin, White Masks: "The colonized is elevated above his jungle statu in proportion to his adoption of the mother country's cultural standards," including, in particular, its language (18). Conversely, other Afncan Arnencan artists, among hem Zora Neale Hurston and Alice Walker, chose to daim the African Arnerican vemacular (that Johnson berates and Fanon criticizes) as a vital part of ficari Amencan culture and expression. Continuhg dong the sarne lines regarding the development of an African Amencan aesthetic, Langston Hughes, a prominent Afkican Amencan poet, declared in 1926 that the drive behind the Harlem Renaissance was the determination of African American artists to "'express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame"' (Andrews, " 1850s " 38). The Harlem Renaissance was so named because Harlem "symbolized the centrai expenence of Amencan blacks in the eariy twentieth century-the urbanization of black Amenca" (Wintz, Black Culture 3). The migration of so many Afiican Amencans to the Iocaiized area of Harlem resulted in a toose coalescence of talented artistic and creative Afncan Amencans who becarne know as the "Negro intelligentsia" and who produced much of the creative work of the early twentieth century within the Afncan American community. Based on his study of the first Afkican American literary renaissance, Andrews asserts that the rebirth of the "spirit of artistic self-reliance and creative autonomy [during the Harlem Renaissance] . . . was the legacy of an earlier generation of Afro-Amencan writers" (" 1850s" 38). This history of ecan American writers is one wÏth which Alice Walker, a modem Afncan Amencan woman writer, identifies. ABmiing its continuation in modem Afncan American writing, Waker says that, unlike writing by white authors that seems to have a defeatist gloom, "black writers seem always involved in a moral and/ or physical stmggle, the result of which is expected to be some kind of larger fieedom" (Walker, In Search 5). This stniggle for fixedom can be traced al1 the way back to the early slave narratives (only twelve percent of which were written by women), the ongin of the Afncan American literary tradition (Washington, "Meditations on History" 7). In The Color Purple, as well as in Possessing the Secret of Joy, Walker draws on the slave narrative forrn in order to ernphasize the subjective centrality of the fmt person narraton of these novels, or, as Susan Willis notes, "to wrest the individual btack subject out of anonymity, inferiority and brutal disdain" ("Alice Walker's Women" 213). In the case of The Color Purple, the individual character of Celie is a figure who, while her experience is not representative of the experience of al1 fiean Amencan women in the South, stands for the experience of a significant number of Afiican Amencan women who had to contend with racism, sexism, and abuse, al1 dealt by either fellow Afiican Amencans or by the white population. The broader experience of "larger £ieedomfl that is the hopeful outcome of Anican American literature of which Wallcer speaks is both a physical and a spiriniai fieedom. The literary risks taken by acan Amencan authos as a result of their "confidence in [their] creative sel[ves]" ultimately led to "the rise of the novel out of the slave narrative" (Andrews 'The 1850s" 50). Further, "an inward-directed candoi about the psychological development of the self Uispired an equally important generic evolution £iom the slave narrative-the black Arnerican autobiography," a genre which allowed Afncan American writers to Merconsider "the nature of the Afio-American quest for selfhood" (Andrews, "1850s" 50-51). Selfhood no longer held the traditional meaning of physical freedom fiom the bonds of slavery; rather, the definition of selfhood had corne to mean a spiritual knowledge of self as well. For example, both Henry Bibb's Narrative (1849) and Samuel Ringgold Ward's Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro (1855) explore the struggle for fieedom on a physical as well as psychological level. Expanding on the theme of hedom, Frederick Douglass' & Bondage and My Freedom (1855) is the first autobiography which "melded a black man's experience as a slave and fieeman into a unified initiation pattern;" there is an underlying elernent of psychological exploration which leads Douglass to a "liberating self- and social consciousness" (Andrews, " 1850s" 5 1). In addition to the new psychological element of African Amencan literahue, there was a "redefining of the concept of heroism in terms of artistic truth to the self' (Andrews, "1850s" 53). For example, Samuel Ringgold Ward identified tmth as "fieedom to express a bittemess toward Amenca" and the way Afncan Americans are treated by whites (Andrews, "1850s" 53). Baraka, expressing his belief in the universdity of Afican Arnerican life and experience, notes that by the time of the Garvey Movement of the early 1920s, the "national sector of the Black bourgeoisie had developed an international consciousness: a national consciousness aware of ils own interests, domestically and internationah)" ("Black Literahue" 146- 147). While early Afncan American authors were ken to develop themselves individually and self- consciously, they were also aware of their bond to the Afiican Arnerican cornmunity:

*. "the Afncan Amencan autobiography and Bildungsroman was grounded in a sustauiing cultural tradition that sees selfaiscovery and self-expression leading to a numiring cornmunity identification and ultimately a hopeful conclusion to the black quest in America" (Andrews, " 1850s" 60).

The quest in hcanberican literature for physical and spintual fieedom takes us fidi circle to Mice Walker's assertion that BcanAmencan writers expect to gain a "larger fieedom" as a result of their "moral and or physicd struggle" qn Search 5). Acknowledging the Aûican Amencan literary history she claims for herself and other African American writers, Walker says: "[Olur literary tradition is based on the slave narratives, where escape for the body and fieedom for the soul went together" (In Search

5). This is particularly tnie in Mcan Amencan women's slave narratives, such as Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written By Herself (1 861), where "the authors placed in the foreground their active roles as histoncal agents as opposed to passive subjects; represented as acting their own visions, they are seen to take decisions over their own lives. They document their sufferings and brutal treatment but in a context that is dso the story of resistance to brutality" (Carby, Reconstnicting Womanhood 36). Al1 of these components are seen in the lives of Janie Crawford in Their Eyes Were Watching God, Celie in The Color Purple, and Tashi in Possessing the Secret of Joy. Unfominately, "the major texts of the Black Aesthetic ignored or patronized women's imaginative and critical writing;" the fomuiate resulf however, was that "black feminist writers and cntics began to make their voices heard within the literary community" (Showaiter, "Criticism" 352). As Washington notes, "the creation of fiction is a matter of power, not justice," and the fact that "power has always been in the hands of men-mostly white but some black" put Afncan American women writers in a marpinaiized position where their writings were discredited, cnticized, and ignored ("Darkened Eye" xvi-xviii). Amencan women writers such as "Haniet Jacobs (Linda Brent), Frances Harper, Padine Hopkins, Fannie BherWilliams, Marita Borner, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Aurston, Ann Petry, Dorothy West, and Gwendolyn Brooks" are just a few of the writee who "have been dismissed by Afro-Amencan Iiterary critics until they were rediscovered and reevaluated by feminist critics" (Washington, "Darkened Eye" xx). Once discovered and reclaimed by feminis: critics, it becarne apparent that the writings of African American women were similar to those of Anican American men. Like their male counterparts, Afiicm hnerïcan women often had a political agenda and wrote with the goal of achieving equality with whites and of having their own spiritual, physicai, and intellectual fieedoms recognized. In addition, Afncan American women's tex& "are clearly involved with issues of social justice: the rape of black women, the lynching of black men, slavery and Reconstruction, class distinctions among blacks9and al1 foms of discrimination against black people" (Washington, "Darkened Eyen xxii). Afiican American women writers also recognized and challenged their marginalized position within the Afiican Amencan community where they were treated as "'the mule[s] of the worlb" (Walker, In Search 232). As Cheryl Wall points out, "'mules' . . . refers to the exploitation of black people's labor, not to black women. However, in Their Eyes Were Watching God [and in the writings of Nice Wallcer] . . . the metaphor of the mule becomes a metaphor for the female condition; the burdens borne are not only those imposed by physical labor, but by sexist attitudes" ("Mules and -Men" 666). Moreover, and more significant, is the fact that, dike Anican American literature written by men, ficanAmencan women's literature is about black women; it takes the trouble to record the thoughts, words, feelings, and deeds of black women, experiences that dethe reaiities of king black in America look very different fiom what men have written. There are no women in this tradition hibernating in dark holes contemplating their invisibility; there are no women dismembering the bodies or cnishing the skills of either women or men; and few if any, women in the literaîure of black women succeed in heroic quests without the support of other women or men in their communities. Women tall<. to other women in this tradition, and the& fiiendships with other women- mothers, sisters, grandmothers, niends, Iovers-are vital to thei. growth and well-being. . . . female relationships are an essential aspect of self- definition for women. (Washington, "Darkened Eye" xxi-xxü) Mary Katherine Wainwright asserts that AfXcan American women writers have added their own slant to the long-standing tradition of protest literature (against the "'economics of slavery'") by including gender protest ("Aesthetics" 2). Perhaps one of the best examples of an African Arnencan woman's appropriation of the techniques found in protest literature behg joined with that of gender protest is in ex-slave Sojourner TrutIi's 1851 address to the Woman Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio:

Dat man ober dar Say dat woman needs to be helped into carriages, and lifted ober ditches, and to hab de best place every whar. Nobody eber helped me into carriages, or ober mud puddles, or gives me any best place and ar'n't I a woman? Look at me! Look at my am! I have plowed, and planteci, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me-and ar'n't 1a woman? 1 could work as much and eat as much as a man- (when 1 could get it), and bear de lash as weii-and ar'n't 1 a woman? 1 have borne thiaeen chilem, and seen em mos' all sold off into slavery, and when 1 cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard-and ar'n't 1 a woman? (White, Ar'n't I 14) According to Wain\Nnghî, Afncan Amencan women writers are differentiated, if not by themselves, at Ieast by their critics, fiom the male Afncan American literature tradition of protest and tragedy by focusing "on community instead of oppression as the primary experience (the 'reality') of their namatives and their racial history" ("Aesthetics" 3). For example, when Alice W&er began The Color Purple, she planned to write a historical novel, but notes that, "womanlike," her "'history' starts not with the taking of lands, or 15 the births, battles, and deaths of Great Men, but with one womau askuig another for her underwear" (Waker, " Writing" 453). Not surprisingly, the strength of the Anican American community as a whole enabled it to survive the racism and seximi that developed as a result of slavery. Further, the existence of Afncan American women's writings is a testament to women's ability to resist and overcorne the attacks, criticism and silencing of their works by both African

American male writers and critics. At the forefiont of this group of Afncan American women writers and cntics is Nice Walker, who claims Zora Nede Hurston, one of few writers of her time who dealt openly with African American female sexuality, "as the literary and criticd foremother of the black female Iiterary tradition" (Showalter, "Criticism" 353). Walker, whose focus on general African Amencan history has been secondary, has learned "the importance of diving through politics and social forecasts to dig into the essentid spirit of individual penons," a lesson consistent with the difference between Afncan American men and women's Iiterature (Waker, In Search 257).

Walker's choice of the verb "to dig" is significant here because, in many instances, that is precisely what has been necessary to recover the creative legacy of

Afncan Arnerîcan artists, particularly that of women. Walker's poem, "Each One, Pull One" describes the artist's task of recovering or "unburying" the lives and works of Afi-ican American artists:

We must Say it dl, and as clearly as we can. For, even before we are dead, they are busy ûying to bury us.

...... *-m.. In short, we who write, paht, scuipt, dance or sing share the intelligence and thus the fate of al1 our people in this land. Each one must pdl one.

Look, 1 temporarily on the rim of the grave, have grasped my mother's hand my fathers leg. There is the band of Robeson Langston's thigh Zora's am and hair your grandfathel's lifted chin the lynched woman's elbow what you've tried to forget of your grandmotheh fiown.

Each one. pull one back into the sun

We who have stood over so many graves know that no matter what they do ail of us must live or none. (Walker, Her Blue Body 374-377) Clearly, Walker figures herself as one of the ones pulling those artists--male and female- -about to be lost forever out of the grave so that their legacy can continue and benefit subsequent generations of Afncan Americans. Although "Each One, Pull One" mentions the need to recover the lives and works of both Anican American men and women-the lives and works of the Afiican American community as a whole--Walker's pnmary interest lies with Afincan American women:

1 am preoccupied with the spirituai &val, the survival whole of my people. But beyond that, 1 am cornmined to exploring the oppressions, the insanities, the loyalties, and the triumphs of black women. (Walker, & Search 250) Her dedication to the work of recovering and telling the stories and the lives of fican American women has resulted in the (re)discovery and recovery of the work of two important artists in Walker's life: her mother and Zora Neale Hurston. Walker, as an acanAmerican woman writer "empowered to narrate the stories of Black women who are past or present creatoa of a Black female culture," feels that it is her role to enable "Black women, especially those most marginalized by race, caste, and class, to have their voices heard and their histones read" (Butler-Evans, Race, Gender, and Desire 13). Certaidy, Walkex's mother and Hurston have been marginalized and silenced and their histories, especially Hurston's, have corne close to being lost to the Afncan Amencan community. Walker's discovery and others' mbsequent rediscoveries of Hurston's life and her work have re-established the importance of Hurston's life and work to the Aûican Amencan literary tradition. It is significant that Walker, in her desire to preserve African Amencan tradition and culture, is maintaining and presenring the African American cultural tradition that formerly has been in the han& of Afncan Arnerican women by vhue of their role durhg slavery. Bernice Johnson Reagon asserts that although al1 cultures want to perpetuate and maintain their culiurai traditions, the actual work of presewing culture falls to women because women have traditionally been the primary caregivers and educaton of young children ("My Black Mothers" 82). While African Amencan men and women alike were subject to racism by white society and were forced to labor on the plantations and in the cotton fields side by side as slaves, acanAmerican women were doubly victimized because of their sex. Because of their ability to produce children who would become slave labor at a marginal and non- monetary cost to the slave owner, Afkican American women were subject to rape by the slave owner. As Carby notes, even though African Amencan female sexuality was not part of the definition of the cuit of tme womanhood, which figured the woman as the center of home and hearth, it created an "alternative sexual code" which defined the sexual code of motherhood: "the glonfied and the breederl' (Reconstructing Womanhood 30). The double victimization of the AfiRcan American woman cornes into play when one considers that the Afiican American male's sense of masculinity was undermined because, in addition to having no control over the economic, politicai, or social spheres of his Iife, he was not able to take the standard and expected patriarchal role of head of the household as its sole provider and caretaker. To add insult to injury, he could not prevent his wife or partner fiom king raped by his owner. Frustration at his uiability to escape the bonds of slavery led to Merdiscrimination: sexism against the ecan American woman in the fom of abuse. Sexual and physical abuse is an issue of control and "control is bought by cordoning off those aspects of sexuality that threaten to make women feel po werless" (Washington, "Darkened Eye" xxiv). Though enslaved and abused by men, both Afncan American and white, and forced to be "'the mule[d of the world,'" Afican Amencan women were dlable to preserve a degree of control over their own domestic situation (Walker, In Search 232). Despite the fact that Afiican American women often had to sacrifice taking care of their own families to the degree they would have liked in order to be "mammy"to the slave owner's children, Afncan American women strived to mise and educate their children, and to pass Afncan Amencan traditions and culture learned nom their mothers on to the next generation. These traditions included storytelling, rootworking, conjuring, quilting, and gardening among others-al1 activities which fed the spiritual "springs of creativity" withui them, a "spirihiality so intense, so deep, so unconscious, that they were thernselves unaware of the richness they held" (Walker, In Search 232). Cofiming this, Reagon states, "[bllack women are nationalists in our efforts to form a nation that wilI survive in this society, and we are also the major cultural carriers and passers-on of the traditions of our people" ("My Black Mothes" 82). Beginning, then, with Walker's rediscovery or discovery of her mothefs artistic and creative work, one realizes that, although the creative impulse has at times been repressed, acanAmerican women have always found an artistic outlet Walker recalls that, as a child, she heard stones wfüch "came fiom ber] mother's lips as naturdly as breathing" (In Search 240). In addition to hard labor in the fields as a sharecropper, the care and maintenance of the family home, and the raising of eight children, Walker's mother stiil found time to relate these storîes to her children, passing on the African Amencan culhual tradition of oral storytelling. There was ofien not enough tirne to fhish the stones she started due to her workload, but Walker's rnother found other creative expression in her gardening. Walker says of her mother's artistic, creative side:

The artist that was and is my mother showed itself to me only after many years. . . . Whatever she planted grew as if by magic . . . A garden so brilliant with colon, so original in its design, so magnificent with life and creativi~)that to this day people . . . ask to stand or waik among my mothefs art. (Walker, In Search 240-241)

Waker noticed more than the art itself; she looked into her mothefs face as she was creating and understood the necessity of having a creative outiet:

I notice that it is only when my mother is working in her flowers that she is radiant, almost to the point of being invisible--except as Creator: hand and eye. She is involved in work her sou1 must have. Ordering the universe in the image of her personal conception of Beauty. Her face, as she prepares the Art that is her gift, is a legacy of respect she leaves to me, for al1 that illuminates and cherishes life. She has handed down respect for the possibilities-and the will to grasp them. (Walker, In Search 24 1-242) So while Walker did not inherit a talent for gardening necessarily (although she may have), the legacy which Walker has inherited fkom her mother is a talent for story- telling. Waker inherited the "creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see" due to the restrictive circumstances surrounding their own [ives which prevented their own creative "flowers" &om coming to full bloom (Walker, -In Search 240). Perhaps it is because circumstances prevented Walker's mother fkom cornpleting her stories that Wallcer herself decided that she would like to finish what her mother started by preserving on paper forever the stories her mother passed on orally. Waker's transcription of oral literature, like Hunton's, broke "the mystique of connection

between literary authority and paûiarchal power"; their acts of putthg pen to paper and writing their oral traditions claimed a space in which AfEcan American women codd express themselves on paper (Pryse and Spillers, Conjuruig 12).

After dl, Waiker says of her writing: "1 write not only what 1 want to read . . . I write dl the things I should have been able to read" (Waiker, In Search 13). 1s it any surprise then that the stories W&er tells are the stories her mother told Waker as a child?

[S]o many of the stories that 1 write, that we al1 mite, are my mother's stories. . . . mhrough years of listening to my mother's stones of her life, 1 have absorbed not only the stories themselves, but something of the manner in which she spoke, something of the urgency that invoives the knowledge that her stories-like her life-must be recorded. (Waker, -In Search 240) This "urgency" to complete her mother's stones is heightened in light of Walker's desire to find a "wholeness" through her writing because "everything around [her] is split up, deliberately split up. History split up, literature split up, and people are split up too" (Walker, In Search 48). Walker's conversation with her mother about Flannery O'Connor, one of many white Southem writers whose work was more readily available than the writings of African Americans, reveals her longing to put the pieces together to create that

"wholeness" :

1believe that the mith about any subject only cornes when al1 the sides of the story are put together, and all their different meanings make one new one. Each writer writes the missing parts to the other writer's story. And the whole aory is what I'm after. (Walker, In Search 49) In her essay "Beyond the Peacock," Wallcer offers an example of how she and her mother might possess two parts of a story which together might form a whole. Walker tells her rnother about O'Comor's story, "Everything That Rises Must Converge," in which an Anican American woman hits a white woman with her purse for patronizing her son. Walkeis mother asks, "'What did the black woman do after she knocked the white woman down and walked away?" Walker responds, "lit is, to me, only hdf a story. You might know the other half" (Walker, In Search 51). Walker's mother does know the other hale she provides the mode1 for the story and character of Sophia in Walker's -The Color Purple when she replies, "'Weil, I'm not a writer, but there war an old white woman 1 once wanted to strike . . ."' (Walker, In Search 51). While Walker's vision of the "whole story" includes recognition of the importance of the works of her literary ancestors, both canonical white and African Amencan writers, her primary interest is in telling the missing pieces of the "whole story," that is, the stories of African American men and women. This is particularly clear in the preface of In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose where she quotes Bernice Reagon's comment in Black Women and Liberation Movements:

I corne out of a tradition where those things ore vahed; where you talk about a woman with big legs and big hips and black skin. I corne out of a black cornrnuniiy where it wus ail right to have hips and to be heuvy. You di& 't feel thai people didn 't like you. The values thut [imply] you must be skinny comefrom another dture . . . Those are not the values that I was given by the women who served us my models. 1 refused to be judged by the values of another culture. I am a black woman and I will stand as best as I con in that imagery (qtd. in Walker In Search 2)

Like Reagon, Walker identifies herself with Afncan Amencan culture and chooses women fkom that community as her primary role models. It is by acknowledging her cornrnunity and her ancestors, both literary and genealogical, that she is able to comect with the past and is able to carry the past into the future with her own writing. A key moment in Walker's career as a &ter took place when she was researching voodoo for a story called "The Revenge of Hannah Kemhuff." Growing up, Wallcer had ofien heard her mother tell a tale of personal victory gained over a white woman through the practice of voodoo. Additionally, Waiker's aunt was reputed to have been cured of madness through voodoo practiced by the local conjurer (Walker, -In Search 11). While researching, Walker learned that the only people who had written about black folklore, voodoo, and superstition were white and largely racid and therefore untrustworthy as collectors of Afncan American follclore. nien she saw Zora Neale Hurston's name in a footnote to a white writer's text. Walker soon learned that Hurston's qualifications as a writer, folklorisi, and anthropologist qualified her to be more than a footnote. Acknowledged in her own day as one of the stars of the Harlem Renaissance, Hurston was also a

member of the American Folklore Society, the Amencan AnthropoIogical Society, American Ethnological Society, New York Academy of Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science; and she was listed in the 1937 edition of Who's Who in Amenca, . . . and, most important, she had published an exceptional body of literature. (Howard, "Zora Neale Htmton" 145) Waiker soon located Mules and Men, "Zora's book on folklore, collecting, henelf, and her small, dl-black community of Eatonville, Florida" (Walker, In Search 83). Naturally, Walker was elated at her discovery: "What 1 had discovered, of course, was a model, " one of the "pieces" that would join together to form Waker's "whole" (Walker, -In Search 12). In an essay titled "Saving the Life that 1s Your Own," Wallcer discusses the importance of models, of foundations on which to base one's work and one's life:

The absence of models, in literature as in life, to Say nothing of painting, is an occupational harud for the artist, simply because models in art, in behavior, in growth of spirit and intellect-even if rejected--enrich and enlarge one's view of existence. (Walker, In Search 4-5) Walker's discovery of, identification with, and admiration for Hurston's life and writings filled a void in Walker's life: "1 became aware of my need of Zora Neale Hurston's work some thebefore I knew her work existed" (Walker, In Search 83). 23 The fm of Hurston's works that Wallcer read, Mules and Men, made clear exactiy what was missing in Walkeis education and in the everyday lives of African Amencan women. Hurston was a mode1 of an A£?ican American femllust, that is, what Walker termed a "womanist," a woman who has "afEmed connectedness to the entire coxnrn~~~@and the world, rather than separation" (Walker, In Search 81). Mules and -Men gave Anican Americans, including Walker's own relatives, "back al1 the stones they had forgotten or of which they had grown ashamed (told to us years ago by our parents and grandparents-not one of whom could not tell a story to make you weep, or laugh) and showed how marvelous, and, indeed, priceless, they are" (Walker, In Search 85). Mules and Men showed African Arnericaas to be "descendants of an inventive, joyous, courageous, and outrageous people; loving drarna, appreciating wit, and, most of al1 relishing the pleasure of each other's loquacious and bodaciour company" (Wallcer, -In Search 85).

Walker was impressed by the strong sense of community Hurston's characters show and discovered that it was denved frorn the closely knit Afiican American cornmunity in which Hurston heaelf grew up. Eatonville, Flonda, incorporated in 1886,

was, as Mary Helen Washington writes,

a "pure Negro town-charter, mayor, council, town rnarshal, and dl." It was . . . a rich source of black cultural traditions where Zora would be nourished OR black folktales and tropical fruits and sheltered from the early contacts with racial prejudice that have so indelibly marked aimost dlother Af?o-Arnerican writers. ("Zora Neale Hurston" 9) Having grown up in such a society, is it any wonder that Hurstonls characters are such

solid reflections of her own "racial heaith" (Walker, In Search 85)? In an essay titled "How It Feels to Be Colored Me" (1928), Hurston reveais her self-confidence and her determination to do what she chose, to live as she chose, regardless of the dictates and the expectations of others. She says, I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorry dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. 1 do not mind at ail. 1 do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dkty deal and whose feelings are al1 hurt about it. . . . No, 1 do not weep at the world-1 am too busy sharpening my oyster knife. (qtd. in Walker In Search 1 15) One could speculate, as Walker does, that Hurston's often overwhelming confidence resulted from her experience of growing up in Eatonville where her father made the local laws and her mother encouraged her to "'jump at de su'" (Hurston, Dust Tracks 13). In Hurston's novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, the protagonist Janie says, "'It's uh known fact you got tuh go there tuh know there. Yo' papa and yo' mama and nobody else can't tell yuh and show ph'" (Huston, Their Eyes 183). Although this statement appears to disclab the cultural inheritance gleaned fiom one's family and community in favor of education and experience away from home, Hurston's family and the surrounding community were the primary disseminators of African Amencan culture to Hurston as she was growing up. Washington asserts that Humon's mother, Lucy Hurston, had the most profound influence on Hurston's young life, even though she died when Zora was thirteen; she "encouraged her daughter's indomitable and creative spirit" ("The Darkened Eye" 9).

Hurston provided a mode1 for W&er in tems of both life and work; although bom approximately fi@-three years apart, both Hurston and Waker have trod similar paths in their efforts to become writers. Most sirnilar are the obstacles of poverty, racism, and sexism which both writers had to overcome in order to Mfill their goals. As noted, upon her discovery of Hurston, Waker felt an immediate kinship with her and

was able to identify with her life and the subject matter of her writings.

The most obvious starting place in this identification is Hmon and Waker's childhoods; both women grew up in lower class families in the "black belt" of the South. Hurston was bom January 7, 1891, in Eatonville to Lucy AM Potts Hurston, a schoolteacher, and John Hurston, a carpenter, Baptist preacher, and author of the town laws. Walker describes the effect Hurston's Eatonville upbringing had on Hurston's concept of selfhood as compared to that of other Mcan Americans growing up elsewhere who believed "that their blackness was something wrong with them":

Zora grew up in a cornrnunity of black people who had enormous respect for themselves and for their ability to govem themselves. . . . This community affinned her right to exisf and loved her as an extension of itself." (Walker, Ln Search 85-86) In fact, it \vas not until Hurston left Eatonville at age thirteen to attend an integrated school in Jacksonville that she discovered she was a "Mecolored girl" (Hurston, I Love Myself 153). Perhaps Hurston drew on her own expenence in relating Janie Crawford's realizatïon that she is Afican Amencan when she does not recognize herself as the dark- skinned child in a photograph:

"Ah looked at de picture a long time and seen it was may dress and mah hair so Ah said: "'Aw, aw! Ah'm colored!"' "Den dey al1 laughed real hard. But before Ah seen de picture Ah thought Ah wuz just like de rest." (Hurston, Their Eyes 9) Neither the author nor Janie, the protagonist of Their Eyes Are Watching God, are aware as children that their race will have any effect on their ability to Iive their adult lives as they choose. Not seeing race as detrimental to the possibilities available to her, Hunton once claimed that in a sea of white people, where she "feel[s] the most colored," she is "a dark rock surged upon, and ovenwept, but through it all, [she] remain[s] [herlself' (Hurston, 1 Love Myself 154). Having spent her early childhood in a "colourless" environment, Huston claimed that issues of race had littie bearing on her addt life and that her gender was at the core of her identity: "At certain times 1 have no race, I am me. . . .The cosmic Zora emerges. I belong to no race nor tirne. I am the etemal ferninine with its string of beads" (Humon, 1 Love Myself 155). Hurston's connection with the "etemal ferninine," specifically with her mother and with nature, the latter of which is descnbed in reproductive terms, is detailed in her autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road as well as in her semi- autobiographical novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. 2 Hurstonfs mother had a stronger influence on Hurston as a young girl than did Hurston's father. In fact, Hurston never reconciled her feelings toward her father who, soon afler his maniage to Hunton's mother, deserted her and their three children to go "to seek and see" (Hurston, Dust Tracks 9). Not wanting her children to become like their "meandering" father, Hurston's mother was detennined to teach them to "stay at home:" "Things like that gave me my first glimmering of the universal female gospel that al1 good traits and learnings come fkom the mother's side" (Hurston, Dust Tracks 13). While Huston's father always tried to break her independent and often impudent spirit, Hurston's mother defended her, saying that she did not want to "'squinch Der] spirit:'" "Zora is my young'un . . . I'll be bound mine will come out more than conquer" (Hurston, Dust Tracks 14). Conquer Hurston did, but she also inherited (or chose to inherit, as a result of her rejection of her mother's role) her father's taste for wandering and so rejected her mother's hope that Huston would follow in her footsteps and one day take her place as the head of a home of ber own "at the center of the world" (Hurston, Dust Tracks [1984] 36). Instead of focusing on the domestic sphere, Hurston looks outward and makes a connection with the natural world:

1 used to climb to the top of the one of the huge chinaberry trees which guarded our fiont gate, and look over the world. The most interesting thing that 1 saw was the horizon. Every way 1 turneci, it was there, and the same distance away. Our house then, was in the center of the world. It grew upon me that 1 ought to walk out to the horizon and see what the end of the world was like. (Hurston, Dust T'racks 27) Two childhood events caused Huston's longings to turn inward: first, her fnend Che Roberts backed out of a promise to make the journey to the horizon; and second, Hurston's father refùsed to buy her a hoae she hoped would carry her to the horizon (Humton, Dust Tracks 28-29). Unable for the moment to physically journey to the horizon, Hurston entered the world of her imagination where she "lived an exciting life unseen" (Huston, Dust Tracks 30). Still longing to travel, nonetheless, Hurston boldly solicited short rides with vehicles passing by the gate-post where she liked to sit and watch the activity and movement of the outside world. Wte passers-by paid her with smdl change for her antics, inadvertently reinforcing her naive yet honest Ecan Amencan pride and self- esteem, qualities revealed in her work throughout her life. Hurston, known as "Old Smarty" to her schoolrnates, gained access to nurnerous books (as well as pennies and clothes) as a result of her interest in and ski11 at reading. Through her reading Hurston developed her sense of separateness, that is, the awareness that her inner and outer selves were quite different, distinct, and incompatible with one another. Gradually, Hurston became aware through her reading of the literary classics as well as Greek, Roman, and Norse myths that she was, both spiritually and physically, not where she wodd like to be:

My sou1 was with the gods and my body in the village. People just would not act like gods. Stew beef, fEed fat-back and morning gits were no ambrosia from ValliaIIa. Raking back yards and canying out chamber- pots, were not the tasks of Thor. I wanted to be away fiom the drabness and to stretch my limbs in some mighty stniggle. (Hurston, Dust Tracks 41) Perhaps the reason Hurston identified herseif with a European heroic figure was that there was no equally heroic counterpart in Afro-Arnerican literature. Nonetheless, unable to completely escape "drabness," Hurston found solace and happiness in the woods where she becornes particulariy attached to one tree she named "the loving pinet' (Hurston, Dust Tracks 4 1). Hurston was the fiflh of eight children and when her mother died, Hurston's happy childhood was dimpted; she was "passed around fkom relative to relative, rejected by her father and his new wife, and forced to fend for henelf' (Howard, "Zora Neale Hurston" 134). Her mother's death marked Hurston's entrance into womanhood; she realized at this the that her parents did not "always love0 each other" and that her mother "had not always been happy" (Hurston, Their Eyes 20; Dust Tracks 68). This was seen particularly in her father's lack of respect when he refûsed to gant her mother's last wishes. Because Hurston's mother relied on Hurston to speak for her, her father's denial of her mother's last wishes-to not have the pillow rernoved from under her head once she was dead, nor have the dock or the mirror covered as custom dictated-also denied Huston her own voice and autonomy, as seen in the way her father physically restrained her. Hurston cited the moment of her mother's death and her own "grief of loss, of failure, and of remoset' as the hour that "began [her] wanderings:" geographically, temporally, and spiritually. Transplanted to Jacksonville, Hurston was

depnved of the loving pine, the lakes, the wild violets down in the woods and the animals I used to know. No more holding down fkst base on the team with rny brothers and their fnends. Just a jagged hole where my home used to be. (Hurston, Dut Tracks 71)

Hurstonts feelings of displacement as a result of her mother's death led her to articulate her sense of separateness:

1 had always thought I wodd be in some lone arctic wasteland with no one under the sound of my voice. I found the cold, the desolate solitude, and earless silences, but I discovered that al1 that geography was within me. It only needed time to reveal it. (Hurston, Dust Tracks 85) The geography within her was in fact the metaphorical geography of the South as found in the folldore and culture of her fellow Afiican Americans and, through her study of

Afiican Amencan songs and storÏes, she was able to reconnect with her family and her culture which created a space in which her own voice could be heard. Mer dl, she was "a Southemer, [with] the rnap of Dixie on [ber] tongoe" (Hurston, Dust Tracks 104). Displaced for the moment, however, Hurston was deprïved of access to books and education and was forced to find employment in order to survive; she said, "1 wanted family love and peace and resting place. 1 wanted books and school" (Hurston, Dust Tracks 97). After working at a series of odd jobs to support henelf, Hurston managed to graduate fiom Morgan Academy (hi& school) in June 19 18 and then enrolled in Howard University where she studied (intermittently, due to financial difficulties) from 1919 until 1924. At Howard, Hunton "met and studied under poet Georgia Douglas

Johnson and the young philosophy professor Alain Locke" (Howard. "Zora Neale

Hurston" 134). Huston's short story "John Redding Goes to Seau caught the attention of Charles S. Johnson, a sociologist who encouraged Hurston to go to New York. By January of 1925 Hurston had arrived in New York with "'$1.50, no job, no niends, and a lot of hope"' (Howard, "Zora Neale Hmton" 134). Two of Hurston's short stories, "Spunk" and "Muttsy," were published in Johnson's magazine, Oppomini@, in June 1925.

It was at an Opportunity awards dinner that Huston met two white patrons who were to have a profound influence on her live: novelist Fannie Hurst and Annie Nathan Meyen. Hurst hired Hurston as a chauffeur, secrem, and traveling companion. Hum's t contribution was not entirely selfless; in exchange for her aid, Hwst got a "crash course in black life and culture fiom the mercuriai Huston, who became the inspiration for and the mode1 for her Iater best-selling novel of black life, Imitation of Life" (WïBlack

30 Culture 179). Meyers gave Hurston room and board and obtained the scholarship which

Bachelor of Arts degree in 1928. At Barnard, Hunton midied under the well-known anthn,pologist Franz Boas, who encouraged her to recognize the value of the acanAmerican lore she had heard growing up in Eatonville "as invaluable folklore, creative materid that continued the Afncan oral tradition and reflected the ebb and flow of a people" (Howard, "Zora Neale Hurston" 135). hed with a "$1400 fellowship &om the Carter G. Woodson Foundation, Hurston decided to . . . record songs, customs, tales, superstitions, lies, jokes, dances and garnes," but failed in her efforts because she

went about asking, in carefully-accented Bamardese, "Pardon me, do you know any foIktales or folk-songs?" [and] the men and women who had whole treasuries of material seeping through their pores looked at me and shook their heads. (Howard, "Zora Neale Hurston" 135) Hurston retumed to New York empty-handed, or, as Hurston put it, she was unable "to collect enough material 'to make a flea a walaing jacket"' (Howard, "Zora Neale Hurston" 13 5). Drawing on her fmt attempt at gathering folklore as an anthropologist, Hurston told a reporter:

"1 needed my Barnard education to help me see my people as they really are. But I found that it did not do to be too detached as 1 stepped aside to study them. 1 had to go back dress as they did, talk as they did, live their life, so that 1 could get into my stories the world I knew as a child." (Hemenway, "Zora Neale Hurston" 2 12) Additionally, the only way the folk who held the wanted folklore would open up to Huston was if she herself became one of the "folk." Hurston's education enabled her to recognize the importance and the value of her community's folklore and traditions; she retumed to Florida as an anthropologist and coiiector of acanAmencan folklore. in Mules and Men, Hurston tells a neighbor in her hometown, "'Ah corne to collect some old stories and tales and Ah know y'all know a plenty of lem and th's why Ah headed straight for home."' B. Moseley, the neighbour, responds to Hurston, "'What do you mean, Zora, them big old lies we tell when we're jus' sittin' around here on the store porch doin' nothin'?" (Hurston, 1 Love Myself 85). Hurston admits that the value of those "big old lies" was not apparent to her until she "'was off in college, away fiom ber] native surroundings"'; the objectivity she gained through "her Harlem experience and her work in anthropology" enabled ber to "reconstruct the folk culture and community of her hometown" (Lenz, "Southem

Exposures" 105). The folktales of Eatonville are not just "big old lies"; rather, they are evidence of a strong and unique Aûican Amencan cultural heritage with its roots in pre- slavery tirnes in Africa. Having run out of her fellowship money and back in New York, Hurston stnick up an agreement with Charlotte Osgood Mason, a wealthy white widow who insisted on being called "Godmother" by those she supported. Mason was a main source of hancial support for many Anican American artists other than Hurston during the Harlem Renaissance, including Langston Hughes, Aiain Locke, Richmond Barthe, and Miguel

Covambias. Mason's interest in Afncan American art arose fiom the belief (a belief shared by her late husband Dr. Rufus Osgood Mason) that "'the most magnificent manifestations of the spintual were found in 'primitive' 'child races"' (Story, "Patronage" 285). Hurston's relationship with Mason began in 1927 and continued until their contract was dissolved in 1931 because Hurston felt stifled by Mason's oppressive control over her life and work. In exchange for financial support for her anthropological research, Hurston was "to limit her correspondence and publish nothing of her research without private approval" (Walker, ln Search 108). As of Decernber 1927, Mason and Hurston had a legally binding contract which read in part as follows:

"Charlotte L. Mason is desirous of obtaining and compiling certain data relating to the music, foklore, poetry, voodoo, conjure, manifestations of arf and kindred matters existing among American Negroes but is unable because of the pressure of other matters to undertake the collection of this uiformation in penon." (Story, "Patronage" 289) In fact, it was impossible for Mason to collect this information because she was white and would not have access to the folkiore and traditions the Afkican American community would offer one of thek own, namely, Hurston. Unfomuiately for Hurston, despite the creative fieedom white patronage bought her, it did not give her ownenhip over her anthropological fmdings; they belonged to Mason. Alain Locke, Howard University professor and middleman between Mason and various fican American artists, had his own motives for collecting fican Arnencan art on Mason's beha "His stratagem was to use Masonts money to prove how like well-bred, intelligent whites, well-bred, intelligent Afro-Americans were" (Story, @'Patronage"290). According to Hurston, his iack of scmples knew no bounds. Hurston clairned that in his race to lead the Harlem Renaissance, he "ran a 'mental pawnshop,' lending out patronage in exchange for ideas which he took in and 'soon passe[d] off as his own"' (Wintz, Black Culture 116). Other Afncan American writers, including kan Toomer, Wallace Thurman, and Claude McKay, concurred with Hurston's view of Locke. Despite these obstacles, the money Hurston received fiom Mason enabled her "to return to the South to collect folklore" (Howard, "Zora Neale Hurston" 135). Frorn 1927 to 193 1 Hurston "collected mounds of material fiom small communities in Alabama and Florida," most of it yet unpublished (Howard, "Zora Neale Hurston" 13 5). After breaking off her relationship with Mason, Hurston found employment in January of 1932 with "the Creative Literature Department of Rollins College at Wmter Park, Florida" and produced a "successfd program of Negro art," but was still plagued with the personal problems which would pursue her mil her death in 1960: iliness and poverty (Howard, "Zora Nede Hurston" 13 7).

After receiving a fellowship fiom the Julius Rosenwald Foudation to study mthropology and folklore, Hurston attended Columbia University fkom 1934 to 1935, but left because she found the structure too restrictive. In May of 1934 Jonah's Gourd Vine was published and the novel sold well: "Reviewers were impressed by the novePs nch language, 'its compelling beauty and deep passion'" (Howard, "Zora Neale Humon" 137). The foI1owing year (1935), Mules and Men was published and received poor reviews from Anican Amencan critics like Sterling Brown, who "found the picture it presented 'too pastoral . . . [it] should be more bitter"' (Howard, "Zora Neale Hurston" 139). Among others, white critic Harold Preece took issue with Hurston's decision to title the book Mules and Men because it supposedly degraded the Aûican Amencan race; in fact, Hurston simply exposed the subordinate position Afncan Americans have held in white society (Howard, "Zora Neaie Hurston" 139). Hurston responded to criticism from both white and African Amencan cntics, saying, "We talk about the race problem a great deai, but we go on living and laughing and striving like everyone else" (Howard, "Zora Neale Hurston" 139). Hurston neither made Anican Amencan life out to be worse than it was (as she saw it), nor did she ignore the reality of Africao American history in America. After breaking off relations with Mason in 1936, Hunton received a Guggenheim Fellowship which funded her trip to "collect folklore in the West Indies" for her second book of foMore Tell My Horse (1938). Hurston's musical, The Great

Day, was £ïrst perfomed Jauuary 1O, 1932; at this tirne she had a brief romance with a twenty-three-year-old cast member of the play. Hurston's best known novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), written in just seven weeks, was based on this romance (Howard, "Zora Neaie Hurston" 13 9). Hurston's third novel, Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939), was written while Hurston taught drama at North Carolina College. Moses, Man of the Mountain received harsh criticism fkom Hurston's contemporaries; Alain Locke called it "caricature instead of portraiture" and Ralph Ellison declared that "for Negro fiction it did nothing" (Howard, "Zora Neale Hurston" 140). Ellison's cnticism seems to typify Hurston's falling out with the Harlem Renaissance movement. As Valerie Smith notes, "By mythologizing rugged individuality, physical strength, and geographic mobility, the narratives of men enshrîne cultural definitions of masculioity" (Washington, "Meditations on History" 8). Unconventionally, Hurston's fernale characters-especidly Janie Crawford in Their Eyes Were Watching God-embodied male definitions of masculinity. Additionally, Hurston found most of her subject matter within the Afncan Arnerican cornmunit.and did not use her writing as a forum for discussions of racism as many Afncan Amencan writen did at that tirne. As Hurston herself said when she was writing Jonah's Gourd Vine, "[slhe wanted to tell a story about 'a man' but Negroes were supposed to write about the Race Problem'" (Howard, "Zora Neale Hurston" 137).

From October 1941 to January 1942, while working as a story consultant at Paramount Studios, Hurston wrote her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, which was published in 1942 and received favorable reviews, as well as the Anisfield-Wolf Award for "its contribution to better race relations" (Howard, "Zora Neale Hurston" 14 1). 3 Her autobiography increased her popularity as a writer and Hurston was able to sel1 several articles to various magazines, including American Mercury, Saturday Evening Post, Negro Digest, World Telegram, and Reader's Digest (Howard, "Zora Neale Hurston" 141). In 1942 at the start of World War II, Hurston moved back to Florida where she stayed until 1947 when she traveled to the Honduras to write Seraph on the Suwannee (1948), a novel about white people written to break "'that silly old deabout Negroes not writing about white people"' (Howard, "Zora Neale Hurston" 141). The novel was not well received and cntics speculated that Hurston was interested in assimilation. The downward slide of Hurstonfscareer began on September 13, 1948, when she was arrested in New York and "charged with committing an immoral act with a ten year old"; Hurston was "out of the country at the time of the aileged crime and the charges were subsequently dropped" (Howard, "Zora Neale Hurston" 144). However, the sensational press coverage of the story did irreparable damage to Hurston's reputation and self-esteem, causing her to leave New York for Florida and to sever ties with her fiends (Hemingway, Dust Tracks xi; Washington, "Zora Neale Hurston" 20). For the next ten years Hurston worked at odd jobs-maid, Iibrarian, reporter, substitute teac her--j ust barely making ends meet. Continuing health and money problems forced her to borrow money £iom fnends and lefi her last writing project, a biography of Herod the Great, incomplete. On October 29, 1959, Hurston had a stroke and unwillingly entered the Saint Lucie County Welfare Home. She died on January 28, 1960 in Fort Pierce, Florida, and is buried in "an unmarked grave in Fort Pierce's segregated cemetery, the Garden of the Heavenly Red' (Howard, "Zora Neale Hurston"

144). Despite Dr. Benton's cornrnents that Hurston was at one time about 200 pounds and appreciated a good meal, Mrs. Sarah Peek Patterson, the director of the mortuary that handled Huston's burial, understood that Hurston had died of malnutrition (Walker, In Search 11 1, 202). Although extremely prolific as a writer and anthropologist throughout her Iife,

Hurston was never able to escape the shadow of poverty which had pumied her fiom the time of her mother's death. As Walker notes, "Being broke made al1 the difference" (Wdker, In Search 90). Criticism that Hurston was the "'perfect "darkie"'" was the unfortunate outcome of Hurston's necessary dependence "'on the kindness of strangers"' as she felt obliged to perform for and please for those who patronized her work (Walker, In Search 90; Hurston, 1 Love Myself 10). Her abject dependence on those who funded her work was "a sign of her powerlessness, her inability to pay back her debts with anything but words" (Walker, In Search 9 1). Despite her financial hardships and her forced reliance on the patronage of whites to hance her creative works, Huston was still abIe to produce works that hold value for readers even today. Sadly, one cannot help but think of what she might have been able to accomplish if money had been more abundant, if she had been able to finance her own creative projects, if her creativity had not been curbed by the restrictions placed on her by her patrons, and if she had been able to afford proper health care. Her impoverished life and her obscured name and reputation as a writer for a penod of thirty yean following her death are testament to the fact that she was not entirely able to overcorne the challenges put to her as a result of her race, class, and gender, despite her overwhelming confidence that she would be able to do so. As Walker notes, "the majolity of black women who tried to make a living doing so, died in obscunty and poverty, usually before their time" (Walker, In Search 35). This was certainly me in Hurston's case. Additionally, Hurston's self-affimiing childhood in Eatonville made it nearly impossible for her to represent African Americans as her critics seemed to demand. In an interview, she described the dichotomy between the two popdar views of the Anican American:

A writer's material is controlled by publishers who think of the Negro as picturesque. . . . There is an over-simplification of the Negro. He is either pictured by the conservatives as happy, picking his banjo, or by the so- called liberals as low, miserable, and cryuig. The Negro's life is neither of these. Rather, it is in-between and above and below these pictwes. (qtd. in Howard, "Zora Neale Hurston" 141) Hurston spent most of her life combathg these stereotypes of Amencan Negro life and, by modern standards, was quite successful; while Hurston's stories do not ignore the reality of or the history of Mcan American life in America, they typically focus on the individual characters and their growth towards selfhood rather than on making a political or social statement designed to encompass the identity of al1 Affican Americans.

Hurston was a woman caught between two opposite poles; on the one hand, she asserted that issues of race had no bearing on her writing, that she thought in terms of individuals only. On the other hand, her social position as a well-educated ecan Amencan writer dependent on the patronage of the white community insisted that she recognize the digerence race made in her life and in her writing. The tension this delicate balance caused is what Francoise Lionnet refen to as a "'journey of ethnic self- scrutiny' through dialogic narration that oscillates between the universal and the particular of culture"' (Watson, "Review" 175). Nonetheless, Hurston's contribution to the genre of autobiography revealed many of the difficuities facing an Afncan Arnerican writer during the Harlem Renaissance and demonstrated the way in which writing a semi-autobiographicai novel produces a more cohesive and internalized writing of oneself than is possible in conventional autobiography. Through the clever rningling of autobiographical tmth with imaginative fiction, Hurston was able to reveal herself as an individual while representing the varied identities and culture of the African American "folk." At the same time, because of her less overtly political position as a fiction writer and novelist, she was able to expose some of the racial and gender tensions experienced by herself, other Anican Amencan artists, and the African American people as a whole. However, by the standards of the Harlem Renaissance, which wanted to prescribe the subject matter chosen by Afncan American artists, Hurston's work was largely unappreciated as it did not fit into their prescriptions of Afiican Amencan life. This, 38 cornpounded with the financial stmins caused by the Great Depression of the 1930s, which al1 but dned up patronage for Afncan American artists, was one of the foremost reasons for the disappearance of her work from the time of her death.

Like Zora Nede Hurston, Alice Waiker grew up in an environment which "affirmed her right to exist" and taught her self-confidence. Born February 9, 1944, to sharecropper parents Willie Lee Walker and Minnie Talluiah Grant Walker, Walker's fïrst years in Eatonton, Georgia, were less than priviIeged. Waker says of growing up poor,

We knew, I suppose that we were poor. . . . But we never considered ourselves to be poor . . . and because we never believed we were poor, and therefore worthiess, we could depend on one another without shame. (Walker, In Search 17) Although lacking money and material goods, Walker claims a wealth of a different soa: "What the black Southem writer inherits as a natural right is a sense of communiîy," the embodiment of which for Walker, as for Hurston, was ber mother, whom Walker describes as "a waiking history of our community" (Walker, In Search 17). Alongside her mother was a community of women who taught Walker self-confidence and independence:

Her mother and her aunts were the most independent people the child knew. . . . Their sense of their own completeness certainly helped to instill the quality of assurance in the young Walker that she would need in order to be a black woman writer in America: "Udike many women who were told throughout their adolescence they mut marry, 1 was never told by my mother or any one of her sisters it was something 1 need even think about. It is because of hem, 1 know women can do anything and that one's sexuality is not affected by one's work." (Christian, "Alice Walker" 261) In addition to kdom hmthe traditional restraints of marriage, the support of this community of women taught Walker that she could pursue and achieve whatever goal she might set her mind to. Aware of the obstacles race, gender, and class might present, it almost goes without saying that Hurston and Walker had to stniggle to attain their goals. For both women, their initial and primary obstacle was class; lower-class women, especially Afirican American women, had (and continue to have) difficulty obtaining money with which to pursue their creative impulses. As Marlene Nourbese Philip asserts in her essay "The Disappearing De bate: Racism and Censorship,"

[elducation, financial resources belief in the validity of one's experiences and reality, whether working class, female, or Black: these are al1 necessary to the production of writing. They are also essential factors in the expression of one's ability. (2 13) Although Hurston's Eatonville experience and subsequent education gave her the confidence to pursue her goals, neither Hurston's education nor her financial resources came without a stniggle. Walker faced similar challenges. Born over half a century afier Hurston, Alice Walker reveals a similar self-confidence to Hurston as she describes herself as a child wanting to go to the fair in "Beauty: When the Other Dancer is the Self ':

Whirling happily in my starchy fiock, showing off my biscuit-polished patent-leather shoes and lavender socks, tossing my head in a way that makes my Bbbons bounce, 1 stand, hands on hips, before my father. "Take me, Daddy," 1 Say with assurance; I'm the prettiest!" (Walker, In Search 3 62)

Six years later, still everyone's darling and evely bit the equal of her brothers in playing at cowboys, Walker was discriminated against because of her gender when her brothers were given BB guns and she was not. Forced to play the role of the enemy Indian instead of a cowboy alongside her brothers, Walker was shot in the right eye by one of her brothen resulting in "a glob of whitish scar tissue, a hideous cataract, on ber] eye" (Walker, In Search 364).

The cause of "the accident," as the famiiy cas iî, was atîributed to Walker heaeif and she Iost her self-esteem with devastating results. Just as Hurston suffered with her mother's death and subsequent move to Jacksonville where she became aware of her racial difference fiom other children, Wallcer and her family relocated also from her former strongly-knit cornmunity to a new environment where young Waker felt alone and ugly:

Now when 1 stare at people-a favorite pastime, up to now-they will stare back. Not at the "cute" little girl, but at her scar. For six years 1 do not stare at anyone, because 1 do not raise my head. (Walker, In Search 364)

Waiker's sense of feeling different was exacerbated by the recent historÏcal past in the racist Southem system, a system in which one was told "stories of lynchings" and where, at age twelve, Walker was informed "'the same Little white girls who had been her playmates were suddeniy to be called "miss""' (Christian, "Alice Walker" 260-26 1). Made il1 by her brother's lie that W&er injured herself and he came to her rescue, Walker went to live with her grandparents in her old cornmunity, but life was still unstable as she lost her cat, a favorite teacher, and finally her mother. Longing to rem to her former state as the pretty child, longing to hold her head up proudly as before, Walker "abuse[d] her eye" nightly: "1 rant and rave at it, in fiont of the mirror. 1 plead with it to clear up before morning. 1 tell it 1 hate and despise it. 1 do not pray for sight. 1 pray for beauty" (Walker, In Search 366). When she MIy had the cataract removed at age fourteen, Walker changed drastically: "Almost immediately 1 become a different penon fkom the girl who does not raise her head. Or so I think" (Walker, -In Search 366). In fact, Walker did not change physically as much as her attitude about heaelf changed; she regained her former self-confidence and, head raised, gained fiiends, a boytkiend, good grades, and graduated as class "valedictonan, popular student, and queen, hardly believing my luck" (Waker, Ln Search 367).

Thirty years after her original injury and about to have a media photograph taken, Walker was nirprised to find herself uncomfortable with her appearance. It disturbed her, but she found redemption in her daughter, Rebecca, who looked her in the wounded eye, which Wallcer feared she would find flawed, and said "Mornmy, there's a world in your eye" (Walker, In Search 370). Walker's dedication of In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens to Rebecca reveals the impact Rebecca's comment had on her mother:

To my daughter Rebecca Who saw in me What 1 considered a scar And redefined it

a world, (Walker, In Search ix)

Waiker cites Rebecca's moment of (in)sight as the same moment when she was able to re-vision her own damaged eye and recognize her wound, which was both physical and psychological, as healed: "There was a world in my eye. And 1 saw that it was possible to love it: that in fact, for al1 it had taught me of shame and anger and inner vision, 1 did love it" (Waker, In Search 370). That night Walker dreamed of dancing with another

"bright-faced dancer," one who "has obviously corne through al1 nght, as 1 have done.

She is beautifid, whole and fkee. And she is also me" (Walker, In Search 370). Interestingly, this image of the "world" in Walkefs wounded eye Mrrors Hurston's vision of the horizon as a place of creative potential and oppomuiity. Although Walker's initiai reading of her wound was one of dismay at her loss of

beauty (as she saw it), her wounding in fact tumed out to be a positive thing in her life, particuiariy in the way that it provided an escape from the poverty she was born into. Walker recognized her wounding as the price of opportunity: "1 used to have a dream in 42 which there was a bus coming down the road . . . and the bus driver would get out where 1 was waiting with my bag. He would hold his hand out for the fare-and 1 would put an eye in it" (Morgan and Steinem, Outrageous Acts 305). The epigraph of her book of poetry, Her Biue Body Everything We Know, is a quote by Albert Camus; it reveais Walkeis feelings toward poverty and the wound which helped her escape it:

Poveriy wm not a caiamity for me. II war aZwuys balanceif by the richness of light . . . circumstances helped me. To correct a natural indifference 1 wm piaced haZfiay between misety and the sun. Misery kept me fiom believing that al1 was well under the sun, and the sun taught me that history wasn? everything. . . . I found in rnyselfan invisible Sun. (Walker, Her Blue Body 6) Just as Hurston's inability to travel physically to the horizon forced her to turn inward and develop her imagination, Walker's wound forced her to search for qualities other than beauty in henelf. As Naomi Wolf points out in The Beauty Myth and as Walker herself discovered as a result of her wound, "Where modem women are growing, moving, and expressing their individuality as the myth has it, 'beauty' is by definition ine* timeless, and generic" (17). Walker's wound forced Walker to recognize at an early age the transitory and elusive value of beauty as a means of definhg the sele she was forced to discover other innate qualities by which she could defme herself. Although she felt isolated and different because of her wound, Walker had a supportive community which included her family and especially her teachers, who "saved her fkom 'feeling alone; fiom worrying that the world she was stretching to find might not exist"' (Christian, "Alice Walker" 260-261). Her teachers encouraged her intellectual development by lending her books:

"'Books became my world because the world I was in was very hard"' (Christian, "Alice Walker" 260-261). Walker dedicates the following poem to the "women who literally covered the holes in our walls with sunflowers": There were women then My marna's generation Husky of voice-Stout of Step With fisis as well as Hands How they battered down Doors And ironed Starched white Shirts How they led Annies Headragged Generals Across mined Fields Booby-trapped Kitchens To discover books Desks A place for us How they knew what we iMust know Without knowing a page Of it Themselves. (Walker, In Search 242-243) In addition to her own re-visioning of herself as an individual, there were monetary advantages to her wounding as well. Unlike Huston, who was never able to escape the constrictions of poverty, Walker's injury made her eligible for and she was awarded a "rehabilitation scholarship" to attend Spelman, an elite AfEcan American woments college in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1961 (Christian, "Alice Waiker" 260). Waiker's scholarship enabled her to gain higher education whereas, without this money, high grades would not have been enough to get Walker to Spelman and on the road to success After two years at Spehm, Walker transferred to Sarah Lawrence where she received her degree in 1965. Two significant events-a traumatic aboaion leading to an attempted suicide and a summer in Anica-inspired Waiker to write the poems in ber first book of poetry, -Once (WaIker, In Search 245-248). Walker's first wrîting success echoes Hurstonts own in the sense that both artists found their voice when they looked within themselves, at their life expenences, and to their communities for their inspiration. Mer graduation, Walker worked for the Welfare Department in New York for a bnef penod before she followed the cal1 of the Civil Rights Movement to Mississippi. Walker was narned the Breadloaf Writer's Conference Scholar for 1966 and the following year she received both the Medl Writing Fellowship and the McDowell Colony Fellowship, al1 of which helped fund her writhg. 1968 saw the publication of Once: Poems while she was a writer-in-residence and Black Studies teacher at Jackson State University, Mississippi. The following year she taught at Tougalo College and in 1970 published her fmt novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland. Walker received the Radcliffe Institute Fellowship in 1971. In 1972 she taught literature at Wellesley College and the University of Massachusetts. Revolutionary Petunias: Poetry, published in 1973, won the National Book Award and the Lillian Smith Award fiom the Southern Regiond Council. In 1974, Walker published Langston Hughes: American Poet, a juvenile biography, and she received the Rosenthal Foundation Award fiom the American

Academy of Arts and Letten for In Love and Trouble: Stones of Black Women, published in 1973. Beginning in 1975, Walker held the post of contributhg editor for Ms. Magazine. In 1976, she published her second novel, and in 1977 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship (Hurston won one, too) as well as her second McDowell Colony Fellowship. Two years later, in 1979, Walker edited I Love Myself When 1 Am

45 Laughing . . .and Then Again When 1 Am Looking Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader and published her third book of poems, Good Night, Willie Lee, 1'11 See You in the Morning: Poetxy. Urged by the characters of the not-yet-written The Color Purple, Waiker relocated outside of San Francisco, California. There she published You Can't Keep A Good Woman Down: Short Stones in 1981 to fund the writing of The Color Purple, which was published in 1982 and was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle

Award. Walker was named distinguished writer in Afro-Amencan Studies at Berkeley and taught literature as a "Fannie Hurst [one of Hurston's patrons] Professor of Literature" at Brandeis University. In 1983, Walker won the Pulitzer Prize for The Color Purple and published In Search of Our Mothes' Gardens: Womanist Prose. The following year, 1984, Walker published her fourth book of poetry, Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautifid. In 1988, Living By the Word: Selected Writings 1973- -1987 was published and was followed in 1989 by Walker's fourth novel, the Temple of My Familiar. Walker's most recent book of poetry, a compilation of her previous books of poetry and a few previously unpublished poems, was published in 1991 and is titled & Blue Body Everything We Know: Earthling Poems 1965-1990 Complete. A children's book, Finding the Green Stone, was published the same year. Her most recent novel is Possessing the Secret of Joy, published in 1992, the focus of which is female genital mutilation. Walker's interest in female genital mutilation led her to make a film, titled Warrior Marks, and to write a non-fiction book, titled Warrior Marks: Female Genital Mutilation and the Sexud Blinding of Women, about it with film-maker Pratibha Parma., both in 1993. Walker followed these projects in 1996 with The Sarne River Twice: Honoring the Difficult, a compilation of autobiographicd writings about her life

and the writing of The Color Purple, Possessin~the Secret of Joy, and Wkor Marks. 1997 saw the publication of Anythhg We Love Can Be Saved, a collection of essays and musings that is subtitled "A Writer's Activism." Langston Hughes, American Poet, her children's biography, was put into print in 1998.

As demonstrated in the above catalogue of her work, Waiker is a prolific writer who publishes on an almost yearly basis. One might question her ability to Q this because, like Hurston, she is Afncan American, she is a woman, and she is (or was) poor; she has the same issues of race, gender, and class working against her as Hurston did. The differences between Hurston and Walker, however, are significant enough to warrant investigation.

Throughout her life, Hurston was forced to rely on individual white patronage to fund her education and to support her creative endeavors and that rneant a loss of creative contrd over her work, a forced dependency on the charity of others. Walker, on the other hand, while bom into the same circumstances, benefited from an injury, which led to a scholarship which allowed her to escape the usual restraints of class and race. Her prowess as a student and as a writer led to a successful academic career as a teacher which supported her literary career hancially and allowed her to write, publish and prosper nom writing. This option was unavailable to Humton, who worked bnef stints as a substitute teacher only. Additionally, Walker was able to attain much more public, rather than individual, funding in the form of grants, scholarships, and awards. AS Walker notes, wnting as a career choice "requires a lot of fiee the. Requires a lot of mobility. Requires money, and, as Virginia Woolf put it so well, 'a room of one's own,' preferably one with a key and a locP (Walker, In Search 37). As if repaying a debt to Hurston for providing W&er with a model, Walker began the process of recovering Hurston's work, which had been out of print for approximately thirty years. As Walker explauis, We me a peopie. A people do not thruw their geniuses awq. And if they are throm away, it is our duty us mtists and ar witnesses for thefirrure to coliect them again for the sake of our chikiren, and, if necessary, bone by bone. (Walker, In Search 92) The recovery process included a review of criticism of Hurston's work. Early criticism of

Hurston's work was largely negative and came fiom male critics, many of whom were white; Walker cailed their criticism "misleading, deliberately belittiing, inaccurate, and generaily irresponsible" (Waiker, In Search 86). Robert Hemenway, author of -Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography, waç the first white critic Walker found who acknowledged Hurston's contribution to the acan American iiterary tradition. Hemenway traced the course of Hurston's Life and reveaied that despite her niccess as a writer, Hurston died alone in poverty and was bwied in an unmarked grave in Fort Pierce, Florida. Inspired by Hemenway's efforts to reestablish Hurston's name and work despite the harsh words of her other cntics, Walker "began to fight for Zora and her work; for what 1 knew was good and must not be lost to us" (Walker, In Search 87). Walker placed a marker on Hurston's grave, located in an overgrown field in Florida, which read: "ZORA NEALE HURSTONI 'A GENTUS OF THE SOUTH'/ NOVELIST FOLKLORIST/ ANTHROPOLOGISTI 1901 [-] 1960" (Walker, In Search 107). In doing so, Walker acknowledged Hurston's respect for AfÎican foklore and cultural traditions. She aiso recognized, perhaps inadvertently, a "pervasive myth in the sections of Anica fiom which blacks were taken to North Arnerica" which "is that a proper bmial is essentiai if the spirit of the deceased is to be at rest and bad luck is not to befd1 surviving relatives" (Stuckey, "Afro-American" 81). Walker recounts her journey to find

Hurston's grave and place a marker on it in her essay "Looking for Zora."

The woman Walker found in her search was one of the most important preservers of ecan American culture and tradition, a "[flolklorist, novelist, anthropologist, serious student of voodoo," essayist, autobiography, and "dl-around black woman," as well as "a woman who wrote and spoke her mind" (Walker, In Search 11, 87). In terms 48 of her lifestyle, her opinions, and her own overwhelming self-confidence, Hurston was

"before her time, in intellectuai circles, in the life style she chose"; she wore brightiy colored "fican" clothing, and she embraced "the folk," those Anican Arnericans, usually poor and nom the South, who had preserved Afncan Amencan folklore and traditions and who spoke in the Afncan American common vernacdar (Wdker, -In Search 89). Huston's educaùon in anthropology enabled her to recognize, study, and connect with her own culture, its idiomatic language, and her fernale ancestors, both biological and Literary (via the orai storytelling tradition). Hurston's works reflect her attitudes toward Afncan Arnerican life. Now while Walker was able to look to Hurston as a model, nowhere in the research is there evidence that Hurston herseif found a model in the Afkican American literary world. As noted, Hurston's education in European mythology woke her to the fact that there was something lacking. It was not until her anthropological education under Boas at Barnard that she realized that the models she was looking for had been there al1 dong. The folk and the foilctales of her community of Eatonville were the connection to Afiican Amencan culture she had been looking for. In this less than clear statement, Hurston acknowledges the model her Afncan American heritage provided: "Like the dead-seeming cold rocks, 1 have mernories within that came out of the material that went to make me. The and place have had their say" (Baker Workings, xiii).

Hurston ailowed her heritage to speak through her just as Waiker considers herself a spiritual medium for her ancestors, including Hurston.

Walker dedicates The CoIor Purple "[t]o the Spirit: / Without whose assistance / Neither this book / Nor I / Would have been 1 Written" and ends the novel by saying, "1 thank everybody in this book for coming"; Waker signs the latter note "A. W., author and medium" (Walker, -Color 296). In a later poem she writes, The old ones visit me in dreams to thank me for The Color Purple;

They te11 me, Daughter, it's the best you've ever done.

1 can't tell you how many rough old han& I've shook. (Waker, Living By the Word 68) Walker's co~ectionwith her literary and geneaiogical anceston is so strong that she sees herself as a medium through which her characters, whose lives are grounded in actual African American history, can speak; through those characters, Walker is able to speak for the myriad nurnbers of African Americans whose historical, social, and political position as slaves and as the oppressed prevented them fiom expressing themselves, both creatively and otherwise. Although it seems logical and natural today that Hurston and then Walker would have been able to draw on Afncan traditions, oral storytelling, and African American idiomatic language, at the tirne, these characteristics were generally not valued by the Afncan American literary cornrnunity as it existed during the Harlem Renaissance. Nonetheless, Hurston dared to clah her heritage for what it was-her own-and proceeded to incorporate it into her work. WaIker, using Hurston's work as her model, naMy followed suit and incorporated many of the same elements. These themes include: the Afncan American cornmunity; the individual lives and personal growth, including sexual fulfilhnent, of Afiican American women (and later, Afiican women as well); patriarchai economic oppression of women; and women's attainment of selfhood through connection with other women.

Iust as Hurston accepted white patronage in order to do her Life's work researching and writing about African American folklore, Walker also risked cnticism in

order to write "the kinds of books she wants to read"; Waker follows her own interests and her own vision in her writing and that is what makes her successful (Waiker, -In Search 7). Additionally, when the subjects one wants to write about are outside the reah of what is commody accepted and encouraged as Merature, the writer faces an even

greater challenge: "She must be her own model as well as the artist attending, creating,

leaming fiom, realizing the model, which is to Say, herself' (Walker, In Search 8). Through this process, Walker leamed that it is through this acknowledgment of one's ancestors, whether they be genealogical or literary, that "the life we save is our own" (Waker, In Search 14). Chapter 2:

Their Eyes Were Watching God and The Color Purple

i love the way Janie Crawford

Ieft her husbands the one who wanted to change her into a mule and the other who tried to interest ber in being a queen a woman ualess she subrnits is neither a mule nor a queen though like a mule she may s&er and like a queen Pace the floor

(Walker, Her Blue Body 264)

It has been established that Alice Walker identifies and connects herself with her ancestors, both literary and genealogical, and that she is fdyentrenched within the female Afiican American litemry tradition. She is so entrenched because she was able to find female African Amencan models in her rnother, story-teller and gardener, and Zora Neale Hurston, anthropologist and writer of the Harlem Renaissance. Sandra GiIbert and Susan Gubar assert that in order for an Anican American woman writer to "participate in a tradition which had until recently offered women very littie in the way of accurate representation or authorid canonization," she would have to "'actively seekfl a female precursor . . . who . . . proves by example that a revolt aga& paîriarchal literary authority is possible"' (Awkward, Inspiriting Influences 4). The reason the "'woman writer . . . searches for a femde mode1 [is] not because she wants dutifully to comply with male definitions of her "femininty," but because she must Iegitimize her own rebellious endeavors"' (Awkward, Inspirithg Influences 7). Hurston's life and works are models of rebelliousness against the patriarchal order and she models the lives of her characters on her own Iife experience as an fican American woman subject to the abuses of racism and sexism. Although Hurston was not able to overcome these obstacles in her own life, she imagined and wrote about her characters achieving success againn similar obstacles. The protagonist of Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie Crawford, exhibits many of the

same survival techniques used by Htmton in her own life and struggle against racism and sexism. As Michael Cooke notes,

The more she is threatened the more resourceful she becomes. The more she is deprived, the more self-sufficient she becornes. That inner stability and outer indominatability mark her off fkom mything that has gone before . . . The confinement of this phenornenon to women's hands is perhaps telling itself, showing the capacity to bear not just children, or the continuance of life, but to bear life itself. (Afko-Amencan Literature, 72) Alice Walker found Hurston's works to be such an inspiration that she once declared that

if she were "[clondernned to a desert island for life, with an allotment of ten books to see ber] through," she would definitely take two of Hurston's: Mules and Men, a book of folldore, and T'heu Eyes Were Watching God Hurston's best known novel and "one of the sexiest, most 'healthily' rendered heterosexual love stories in our literature" (Walker, In Search 88). Walker gives the latter book the highest praise possible: "There ir no book more important to me than this onet'; this is because the novel reveais African American people as "complete, cornplex, undiminished human beings" (Waker, In Search 86, 85). As an African Amencan woman, she chose "the model, the example, of Janie Crawford" fiom Their Eyes Were Watching God, a book Waker asserts is "as necessary to [her] and to other women as air and water" (Walker, In Search 7). Given that Their Eyes Were Watching God had such a profound effect upon Walkets life, it follows that the novel wodd aIso inform her own work. As Gilbert and 53 Gubar note, "the textual affinities between black women's work generally exist . . . as a function of black women writers' conscious acts of refiguration and revision of the earlier canonical texts" (Awkward, Inspirithg Muences 4). Walker draws on several characteristics and themes found in Their Eyes Were Watchhg God and uses them to achieve the same goal of seliood in the Me of her protagonist, Celie, just as they are used to achieve selfhood for Janie Crawford in Hurstonts novel. These similar thernes are: the individual lives and personal growth of women within the African Amencan community; the expression of sexual desire in women; economic oppression by patriarcM forces; and the femaie protagonists' comection with a cornrnunity of wornen as the means by which they are able to achieve selfhood and the right to speak for themselves withîn the community which formerly oppressed them as "the rnule[s] of the world" (Walker, In Search 232). Both Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and Walker's The Color Purple are set in primarily Afncan Arnencan comrnunities. For this reason Philip criticized Waiker for ornithg in The Color Purple what she referred to as the "historical underpinnings" of African Americans living in a dominant white society in favor of telling the story of individuals and their triumphs over adversity (Frontiers 206). Although the oppression of AfÎican Americans as a race is not the focus of the novel, the historical background informs the entire work. Likewise, Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching Go& while often described as a romance novel, is also embedded in African American history. African American history is very much the foundation of the world into which Janie Crawford is bom. At the beginning of the novel the reader lemthat Janie was raised by her grandrnother, called "Nanny" (in the Afncan American "mammy" tradition) by her and by the four white grandchildren raised with Janie on land owned by a wealthy white family, the Washburns. Nanny is a former slave and acknowledges the

limitations slavery places on an AkanAmerican woman:

"Ah was bom back due in slavery so it wam't for me to fulfill my dreams of what a woman oughta be and to do. Dat's one of de hold-backs of slavery. But nothing can't stop you from wishin'. . . . Ah didn't want to be used for a work-ox and a brood-sow and Ah didn't want mah daughter used dat way neither." (Huston, Their Eyes 15) Despite her desire for freedom, Nanny's understanding of the ecanAmerican woman's role is clear:

"So de white man throw down de load and tell de nigger man tuh pick it up. He pick it up because he have to, but he don? tote it He hand it to his wornenfoiks. De nigger woman is de mule uh de world so fur as Ah can see." (Hurston, Thek Eyes 14) This def~tionof the Afncan American woman is certainly evident in Nanny's life. She was raped and impregnated by the slave master and then abused by the master's wife when the master went off to fight in the civil war. After giving birth to a child with ""'gray eyes and yaller hair""' and threatened with a senous whipping and possible death, Nanny escaped with her child into the swamp, risking snakebite and recapture, and emerged after the civil war ended and slavery was abolished (Hurston, Their Eyes 17). After emancipation, Namy had no other option but to continue doing the work she did as a slave and so she gained employment with the Washburns and transplanted her drearns of keedom fiom herself to her daughter, Lee:

"Ah wanted to preach a great sermon about colored women sittin' on high, but they wam't no pulpit for me. Freedom found me wid a baby daughter in mah arms, so Ah said Ah'd take a broom and a cook-pot and throw up a highway through de wilderness for her. She would expound what Ah felt.'' (Hurston, Their Eyes 15) Emancipation fiom slavery did not guarantee a pulpit for Mcan American women to speak fiom, not to mention the personal fieedom which would enable Le* to become a teacher. With the help of Mrs. Washbum, Leafy gained an education but was raped by the schoolteacher who, when he retumed later to propose mamiage, was chased away by the sheriff and his hounds. Traumatized, Le* "'took to drinkin' likker and stayin' out nights"' (Hurston, Their Eyes 18-19). Mer Leafy disappeared, Nanny tramferred, yet again, her dreams of a pulpit fiom which African American women could speak to Lews daughter, Janie: "'Ah said Ah'd Save de text for you'" (Hurston, Their Eyes 16). This is the historical foundation of Janie Crawford's Iife and Nanny's views (based on her experience) of the Afiican American woman's role in a society impinge upon the possibilities and options available to Janie in her life. Likewise, the history of racism in the South underlies the circumstances CeIie's father found himself in as a former slave who waç lynched while ûying to a- some firiancial independence through free enterprise. Celie's father was a "well-to-do famer'' who opened a general store and a smail blacksmith's shop. When white merchants felt they were losing al1 the Afncan American business to him, they bumed down the store and lynched him, with no Iegd recowse laid against them. The effect on the family was disastrous; Celie's mother went mad, but, out of fmiancial necessity, married the man Celie knew as "Pa" and had more children until she died when Celie was fourteen

(Walker, Color 180-18 1). Meanwhile, Celie was the victim of rape and of (what she believed was) incest at the hands of her "Pa"; these rapes resulted in the births of two children, Adam and Olivia, and the removai of these children fiom their mother's arms, It is apparent in the background and family life of Walker and Hurston's protagonists, Janie and Celie, that Afncan American history against the larger backdrop of white society is important. Born a slave and forced to work like a mule al1 her life, Nanny was not able to gain access to the pulpit she wished to speak nom. Voiceless, she dreamed of puttuig her child and then her grandchild behind the pulpit to speak for her. Similady, had Celie's father not been lynched as a result of white racism, ber mother might have kept her sanity and the children might have been raised in an economically stable home which supported the development of the children's self-esteem. Instead, Celie has some serious issues to contend with: self-worth, self-confidence, and acceptance of her sedty. The theme of economic oppression is significant Just as witing requires the, money, and "'a room of one's oe'so financial independence is important to the process of selfaiscovery (Walker, In Search 37). While she was not, perhaps, thinking of self4iscovery as a goal to be sought after, Nanny was certauily aware of the importance of fmancial independence when she chided Janie for ailowing henelf to be "lacerated" with a kiss fkom Johnny Taylor:

"'Ah dont want no trashy nigger, no breath-and-britches, lak Johnny Taylor usin' yo' body to wipe his foots on. . . . Ah wanted yuh to school out and pick fiom a higher bush and a sweeter berry."' (Hurston, Their Eyes 12-13) In choosing Logan Killicks, owner of six@ acres of land and the only organ in town belonging to colored folks, Nanny felt she was providing a better life for her granddaughter. Janie had a different idea of how maniage shouid be.

Janie's vision of marriage is intimately comected to nature and, in particular, with Janie's attachent to the blossoming pear tree in her backyard:

She was stretched on her back beneath the pear tree soaking in the alto chant of the visiting bees, the gold of the sun and the panting breath of the breeze when the inaudible voice of it al1 came to her. She saw a dust- bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree fkom mot to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight. So this was a marriage! She had been summoned to behold a revelation. Then Janie felt a pain remorseless sweet that left her limp and languid. . . . Oh to be a pear tree-any tree in bloom! Wiîh kissing bees singing of the beginning of the world! She was sixteen. She had glossy leaves and bursting buds and she wanted to struggle with life but it seemed to elude her. Where were the singing bees for her? Nothing on the place nor in her grandma's house answered her. She searched as much of the world as she could fkom the top of the fiont steps and then went on down to the front gate and leaned over to gaze up and dom the road. Looking, waiting, breathing short with impatience. Waiting for the world to be made. (Hurston, Their Eyes 10- 1 1) awakening, as described metaphorically in the blossoming of the pear tree, is embodied initially in Janie's vision of future personal happiness in the form of Johnny Taylor as he cornes up the road; he is covered in the golden pollinated dust and Janie kisses him only to be caught by Nanny. Once Nanny has had her say regarding Janiefs fuhue with Johnny, Janie admits tbt she does not love Johnny. Janie does not want to be a mule, according to Nanny's doctrine of Afncan American womanhood, but not having experienced marriage-the only option offered to her by her grandmother-she wants to know whether it will end the "cosmic loneliness" she feels (Hurston, Their Eyes 20). Foreshadowing her fiiture disappointment in her rnarriage with Logan Killicks, Janie thinks, but is unable to express the thought to

Nanny, that "[tlhe vision of Logan Killicks was desecrating the pear tree" (Hmon, Their Eyes 13).

Having made such a strong connection with nature and with her own sexual desires, she cannot help but be disappointed with her maniage to Logan; she assumes, rnistakenly, that "husbands and wives always loved each other, and that was what marriage meant. It was just so. . . . She wouldn't be lonely anymore" (Hurston, Their Eyes 20). Sanie is neither impregnated nor beaten "already," as Nanny expects (given her own history), but Logan's attitude towards Janie changes as he tries to get her to tote wood and suggests that she could handle a mule when ploughing time arrives (Hurston, Their Eyes 26). Having experienced a real marriage, Janie is finally able to verbalize her expectations of marriage to Nanny: "'Ah wants things sweet wid mah marriage la.when you sit under a pear tree and think"' (Hurston, Their Eyes 23). When she redizes that "maniage [does] not make love," she returns to her former pastime of looking "up the road towards way off' (Hurston, Their Eyes 24). hie moves fiom childhood into womanhood with her rejection of her marriage to Logan and the failure of her vision of marriage. Janie's decision to leave Logan (regardless of whether Jody Starks was waiting for her or not) puts a "bee [in] her bloom" and calls for the creation of new language: "Her old thoughts were going to corne in handy now, but new words would have to be made and said to fit them" (Hurston, Their Eyes 3 1). Jody Starks "did not represent sun- up and pollen and blooming trees" for Janie, "but he spoke for far horizon" and for "change and chance" (Hurston, Their Eyes 28). Jody aims to be a "big voice" in Eatonville and, fittingly, prefaces most of his sentences with the phrase "1 god," indicating exactly how highly he thinks of himself (Hurston, Their Eyes 27). He plans to treat Janie like a "pretty doll-baby" by puning her on a pedestal, and while this sounds attractive to hie, she does not reaiize that he plans to be a "big voice" over her as well. She is essentially bought and paid for in Jody's vision of what marriage brings to one's econornic and social value in a cornmunity. Her new husband Jody has no intention of giving her a chance to speak: "It must have been the way Joe spoke out without giving her a chance to Say anything one way or another that took the bloom off of things" (Hurston, Their Eyes 41). Janie's privileges as the wife of the "big voice" soon become a straight-jacket for her as he forbids her to participate in the fiont porch story teIling sessions and he insists she cover her beautifid hair with a head-rag (Hurston, Their Eyes 48). Hurston's analogy for Janie's marriage to Jody is apparent in the story of how Jody saved Matt's mule from being baited, only to tie it up in front of the store, feed if and wait for it to die. When Jody "fiees" the mule, Janie gets her first chance to speak publicly: "'Freein' dat mule makes uh mighty big man outa you. . . . You got uh town so you fieed uh mule. You have tuh have power to fkee things and dat makes you lak uh king uh something" (HUL3fon, Their Eyes 55). Hambo acknowledges Janie's ability to speak but does not speak to her: "'Yo wife is uh born orator, Starks"' (Hurston, Their Eyes 55). Interestingly, Janie's speech silences Jody: "Joe bit down hard on his cigar and bearned al1 around, but he never said a word" (Hunton, Their Eyes 55). When the mule finally dies, Jody forbids her to go to the dragging out (of the mule's body) and does not understand her resentment at not being allowed to participate in a community event:

She wasn't even appreciative of his efforts and she had plenty cause to be. Here he was just pouring honor all over her; building a high chair for her to sit in and overlook the world and she here pouting over it! (Hurston, Their Eyes 58-59) Despite his big plans to elevate her to a high chair, he remains sexist and begins to verbally abuse Janie: "'Somebody got to think for women and chillun and chickens and cows. I god, they sho don't think none theirseIves"' (Hurston, Their Eyes 67). Janie speaks up for henelf in response-"'Ah knows uh few things, and womenfoks thinks sometimes too!"-but Jody's ultimate goal is Janie's submission (Huston, Their Eyes 67). For the most part, she acquiesces to Jody's demands, "taking the easy way away fiom a hiss" to keep him amiable (Hurston, Their Eyes 59). It is not until Jody begins to physically abuse Janie that something in Janie "fell off the shelf inside her" (Hurston, Their Eyes 68). Janie has a moment of insight when she sees "her image of Jody tumbled down and shattered" and realizes that Jody was not "the flesh and blood figure of her drearns" but rather "something she had grabbed up to drape her drearns over" (Hurston, Their Eyes 68). Janie recognizes finally that Jody is not the vision she saw coming up the road as she lay under the pear tree:

She had no more blossomy openings dusting pollen over her man, neither any glistening young fitwhere the petals used to be. She found that she had a host of thoughts she had never expressed to him, and numerous emotions she had never let Jody know about. Wgspacked up in parts of her heart where he could never hdthem. She was saving up feelings for some man she had never seen. She had an inside and an outside now and suddenly she knew how not to mix them. (Hurston, Their Eyes 68) Janie's recognition of the separateness of her inner and outer selves enables her to find her own voice within the cornmtmity, despite her husband's efforts to silence her. As Barbara Johnson notes in her essay "Metaphor, Metonymy, and Voice in Their Eyes

Were Watching God" :

Janie's acquisition of the power of voice thus grows not out of her identity but out of her division into inside and outside. Knowing how not to mix them is knowing that articulate language requires the CO-presenceof two distinct poles, not their coIiapse into oneness. . . . Far fiom being an expression of Janie's new wholeness or identity as a character, Janie's increasing ability to speak grows out of her ability not to mix inside with outside, not to pretend that there is no difference, but to assume and articulate the incompatible forces involved in her own division. (49-50) In other words, in order for hieto transgress her position in society as an African Amencan woman, that is, as a "mule of the world," she has to recognize her inside and outside selves and speak about them (Walker, In Search 232). Janie began to be "petal open" about her inside emotions and dared to speak on the front porch with the men. Hurston cites Joe Clark's store in the real Eatonville as "the heart and spring of the town," the place where the men gathered to gossip and hold "'Iying' session[s]" (Hurston, Dust Tracks 48). Although the store is a place of male discourse, it is the women who have mastery over language, albeit not necessarily on the store porch. For exarnple, in the real Eatonville, Hurston's father "would start to put up an argument that would have been terrific on the store porch, but Marna would pitch in with a single word or a sentence and mess it dl up" (Hurston, Dust Tracks 69). As -Their Eyes Were Watching God is a serni-autobiographicd novel and draws on Hurston's Eatonville experiences, Janie speaks out in a similar fashion when she contradicts Jody's public clah that he is "1 god." She claims female power over Ianguage when she declares,

"Sometimes God gits familiar wid us womenfolks too and talks His inside business. He tdd me how surprised He was 'bout y'all tu-g out so smart after Him makin' yuh different; and how surprised y'all is goin' tuh be if you ever tind out you don? know half as much 'bout us as you thhk you do. It's so easy to make yotself out God Aimighty when you ain't got nothin' tuh strain against but women and chickens." (Hurston, Their Eyes 70-71) Janie's speech implies that women are men's equals-at least, if not better than equals in God's eyes. Janie's sense of separation remains strong as she watches her outside self, which Hurston descnbes as the "shadow of herself," which implies that it is less mbstantial than her inside self, "going about tending store and prostrating itself before Jody, while al1 the time she herself sat under a shady tree with the wind blowing through her hair and her clothes" (Hurston, Their Eyes 73). Temfied of his own aging body, Jody becomes more verbally abusive towards Janie as if "the more ridicule he poured over her body," the more he would divert public "attention away fiom his own" (Hurston, Their Eyes 74). Finally, Janie has enough of his abuse and speaks up agaimt him, in public, in the middle of his store. Janie points out the disparity she finds in the fact that the men are pehtted to criticize women for aging, while women are not supposed to Say a word about the same process taking place in the men; Janie says to her aging husband Jody Starks,

"Naw, Ah ain't no young gal no mot but den ah ain't no old woman neither. Ah reckon Ah looks mah age too. But Ah'm uh woman every inch of me, and Ah know it. . . . Humph! TaW 'bout me lookin' old! When you pull dom yo' bntches, you look Iak de change uh life." . . . Janie had robbed him of his illusion of irresistible maleness that al1 men cherish, which was temble. (Hurston, Their Eyes 75) Mer Jodyts death, she sends her face-her outside self-to the funeral while "heae1f'- her inner self- "went rollicking with the springtime across the world" (Hurston, -Their Eyes 85). In addition, she is preparing finally to make her "great journey to the horizons in search ofpeople; it was important to al1 the world that she should fÏnd them and they hdher" (Hurston, Their Eyes 85). It is at this point in her life that hie finally expresses her hatred for her grandmother who "had taken the biggest thing God ever made, the horizon-for no matter how far a person can go the horizon is still way beyond

you-and puiched it in to such a little bit of a tbg that she could tie it about her grandmother's neck tight enough to choke her" (Hurston, Their Eyes 85). In hie, Hurston creates a heroine who survives both her husband's efforts to silence her and the oppression hhented from her femaie ancestors and perpetuated by both men and women within the community. Janie fmds her own voice through her identification with people who have achieved her vision of horizon and she keeps her initial vision of the blossoming pear tree dive. Janie's vision of the pear blossom and her journey to the horizon are maintained throughout the novel and corne to fiuition in her love relationship with Tea Cake. To Janie, Tea Cake

looked like the love thoughts of women. He could be a bee to a blossom-- a pear blossom in the spring. He seemed to be crushing scent out of the world with his footsteps. Cwhing aromatic herbs with every step he took. Spices hung about him. He was a glance fiom God. (Hurston, Their Eyes 101-102) Coming to ternis with her grandmother's repressive influence on her life, Janie tells Phoeby, authorized to speak on Janie's behalf to the community, that her relationship with Tea Cake "'aui't no business proposition, and no race after propem and titles. Dis is uh love game. Ah done lived Grandma's way, now Ah means tuh live mine'" (Hurston, Their Eyes 108). This "love game" is a possibility now because Janiets inheritance has alleviated al1 economic concerns which would have been an issue formerly. An independent woman nnally, Janie's life changes considerably as a result of her relationship with Tea Cake. She begins doing and leaming things formerly done and known only by men: playing checkers, telling stories, and hunting. She leams to trust Tea Cake when he teils her, "'Nobody else on earth kin hold uh candle tuh you, baby.

You got de keys to de kingdom,'" and, as a result of her "self-crushing love" for Tea Cake, her "sou1 crawled out from its hiding place" (Hurston, Their Eyes 104, 122). The phrase "self-cmhing love" is signifiant because it foreshadows the outcome of Janie and Tea Cake's relationship. Janie knows that Tea Cake cannot fiIl kdy Starks' place in the store and, moreover, that he is not the type to stay in one place and settle dom. So hie uproots herself fiom her community, sells the store, marries Tea Cake, and goes off with hlln to "'start al1 over in Tea Cake's way"' (Hurston, -Their Eyes 108). Tea Cake's "way" is a wild life of travel, meeting new people, p-g, drinking, gambling, and the occasional temporary job to make money, al1 of which is very exciting and new to Janie's "çtrange eyes" (Hurston, Their Eyes 123). Janie and Tea Cake go "'on de muck"' together in the Everglades of Florida to do seasonal work and to make "'money and fun and foolishness"' (Hurston, Their Eyes 122). Foolishness results in a physical fight, however, when Tea Cake's behavior with the flirtatious Nunkie makes Janie jealous and then angry when he denies he was involved with Nunkie: "'You done hurt mah heart, now you corne wid uh lie tuh bruise rnah ears!"' (Hurston, Their Eyes 13 1). Later, Tea Cake's ears and ego are bruised when he overhears Mrs. Turner, an Afncan Amencan woman who thinks her Caucasian features make her better than her pees, suggest that Janie marry her brother. In addition, Mrs. Turner insults Afncan Arnencans as a race and himself in particular and hiesays little to defend either. Rather than conûonting Janie about what he has heard, he resorts to abuse:

Before the week was over he had whipped Janie. Not because her behavior justified his jealousy, but it relieved that awful fear inside him. Being able to whip her reassured him in possession. No brutal beating at all. He just slapped her around a bit to show he was boss. (Hurston, -Their Eyes 140) Janie may hold the "keys to the kingdom," as Tea Cake puts if but Tea Cake is the king of that kingdom-a stereotypical paûiarchal mamage-and desover Janie with his fim. He brags to Sop-de-Bottom that, "'Janie is wherever Ah wants tuh be. Dat's de kind uh wife she is and Ah love her for it. . . . Ah didn't kat Janie 'cause she done nothin'. Ah beat ber tuh show dem Tumers who is boss. Ah set in de kitchen one day and heard dat woman tell mah wife Ah'm too black fuh her"' (Hurston, Their Eyes 141). Tea Cake's "amfear" of Iosing hie is unfounded, however, as she still loves him and has no regrets: "'If you kin see de light at daybreak, you don't keer if you die at dusk. It's so many people never seen de light at all. Ah ww fùmblin' round and God opened de doof"

(Hunton, Their Eyes 15 1). Just as Janie acknowledges that she has seen "de light," the sky darkens, the wind begins to blow, and a hurricane develops that sets the Everglades awash in raging water. During the storm, Tea Cake is bitten by a rabid dog; a visit to the doctor is suggested, but the wound heals, and it is not until a month later that the symptoms of rabies begin to appear in Tea Cake and he is diagnosed by a doctor. Interestingly, the ùnpetus for Tea

Cake's final attack on Janie is a fit of jealousy-and his "adfear"; the disease has taken over his body. To save her own life, she shoots hirn with the rifle just as he takes a shot at her with the pistol; he dies sinking his teeth into the flesh of her ami. Over the course of her trial for Tea Cake's murder, fanie faces, not death, but the

"lying thoughts" of the Afiican Amencan audience at the triai: "They were there with their tongues cocked and loaded, the only real weapon left to weak folks. The ody killing tool they are allowed to use in the presence of white foiks" (Hurston, Their Eyes 176). The acanAmerican men in the courtroom see themselves as the "mule[s] of the world" because they interpret the Merence between the white oppression of Anican Arnerican men and women to be gender, rather than race, related (Walker, in Search 232). In this case, they believe it would be a non-issue for whites if an fican Arnerican

65 man killed another ecanAmerican man, while an Afncan Amencan woman killing an Afiican American man elevates the woman "into utter powerfulness by killing a black man" @uPIessis 1990, 104). Perhaps this is why the white jury, as well as a group of white women, fom a "protecting wall" around Janie which results in her acquittal and subsequent Eeedom (Hurston, Their Eyes 179). The "lying thoughts" of the Anican

Arnencans who do not understand the situation (as Janie explains it to the jury) dissipate after the trial and her acquittal and she is accepted once again into the cornmunity as a wealthy widowed woman. Having gone Tea Cake's way until his death, Janie returns to Eatonville with a new perspective. For Janie, Tea Cake represented something other than the husband and lover he was; this is seen in her early description of him as a spirited horse she releases to the outside air to "leap forth and mount to the sky on a wind" (Hurston, Their Eyes 103). Mer his death, the spirit of the home remains and her vision of maniage is fulfilled in the fdpages of the novel:

Then Tea Cake came prancing around her where she was and the Song of the sign flew out of the wiodow and lit in the top of the pine trees. Tea Cake, with the sun for a shawl. Of course he wasn't dead. He could never be dead until she herself had f~shedfeeling and thinking. The kiss of his memory made pictures of love and light against the wall. Here was peace. She pdled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it fiom around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her sou1 to corne and see. (Hurston, Their Eyes 183-1 84) The image of the horse reveals that Janie's experience of life and love is ongoing and encompasses more than her relationships with men. She tells Phoeby to communicate on her behalf to the cornmunity that "love ain"t somethin' lak uh grindstone dat's de same thing everywhere and do de sarne thing tuh everythuig it touch. Love is lak de sea It's a moWil thing, but still and dl, it takes its shape fkom de shore it meets, and it's different with every shore" (Hurston, Their Eyes 182). This comment implies that Janie's expenence of life and love will be different yet again with her remto Eatonville. Most notable, however, is the fact that Janie, having completed her quest for selfhood, returns to the community of Eatonville to share her experiences with another womaq Phoeby, who will speak on her behalf to the rest of the commmity. Able to imagine and write about Janie as an active and experienced romantic heroine, Hurston does not feel fiee to represent herself as a lover in the same light. In the chapter titled "Love" in Dust Tracks on a Road, Hurston downplays her knowledge in matters of love and romance:

What do I really know about love? 1 have had some experiences and feel fluent enough for my own satisfaction. . . . But pay no attention to what 1 Say about Love, for as 1 said before, it may not mean a thhg. . . . Maybe the old Negro folk-rhpe tells al1 there is to know: "Love is a funny thing; Love is a blossom; If you want your hger bit, poke it at a possum." (Hurston, Dust Tracks 2O3,2 14) Hemenway's apt observation on Hurston's considerable skill at employing rhetoricd strategies (such as the above non-admission of knowledge about love) that enable her to conceal more than she reveals is reinforced by Hurston's own admission that "she did not want to write the book at al1 because 'it is too hard to reveal one's inner self" (Washington, "Zora Neaie Hurston" 20). However, it is apparent that she found satisfaction with her writing and with her life experiences, despite their hardships: "But already, I have touched the four corners of the horizon, for fiom hard searching it seems to me that tears and laughter, love and hate make up the sum of life" (Howard, "Zora Neale Hurston" 145). Hurston's attempt to reveal her inner self in Dust Tracks on a Road is a reflection of the assertion she makes at the beginning of her semi-autobiographical novel, -Their Eyes Were Watching God: Now, women forget al1 those things they don? want to remember, and remember everything they don't want to forget The drearn is the tnxth. Then they act and do things accordmgly. (Huston, Their Eyes 1) The thing that Janie wants to remember is that Tea Cake was "a bee for her bloom;" she chooses to forget that her relationships with Logan Kiliicks, Jody Starks, and Tea Cake were abusive. Janie's experience and self-lmowledge give her the strength to continue her life without Tea Cake: "Two things everybody's got tuh do fûh theyselves. They got to go nih God, and they got tuh fhd out about livin' fuh themselves" (Hurston, -Their Eyes 183).

Just as Janie's iife experience teaches her about herself, Celie, the protagonist of Alice Wdker's The Color Purple, also "find[s] out about livin"' for herself through her experiences as a economically stmggling Afkican American woman in the South. Like Nanny, a former slave whose ability to fulfill her dreams were hampered by racism and sexism, Celie's family history, rooted in the historical mith of slavery, put in motion a series of events which made it impossible for Celie to be able to fidfill her dreams. Walker herself grew up hearing stories of lynchings that had occurred in the not too distant pst and incorporated this history into Celie's family background. Celie's biological father was lynched for running a successful store catering to AfÎican American patrons; the white man who ran the only other store in the area lost business to him and, after falsely accusing Celie's father of raping a white woman, lynched him. The identity of her biological father is kept fiom Celie and she grows up thinking AIphonso, her mother's second husband, is actuaily her father. She is traumatized by Aiphonso's repeated raping of her body when Celie's mother refuses to have sex with him; this is trauma is exacerbated by the false belief that Alphonso is her father. Celie's mother dies "screaming and cussing" at her because she's pregnant and slower in doing al1 the household chores (Walker, Color 3). Celie's pregnancies mean that, despite NettÏers protests that Celie is smart and enjoys school, Celiets education is cut short. AIphonso takes Celie's children fiom her (she believes Atphonso has killed the first child and sold the second) and marries her off to Albert, whom Celie refers to as Mr, Forbidden by his father to marry Shug Avery, the only woman Albert loves and the cause of Albert's first wife's death, Albert settles for Celie when Alphonso refuses to allow his marriage to Nettie, Celie's pretty younger sister and Albert's fkst choice. Albert accepts Celie because she cannot get pregnant again, because she can cook and take care of Albert's children fkom his first marriage, because she has a dowry of a cow and linen, and because "she can work Iike a man" (Waker, Color 9). As Albert's wife, she is subject to even more abuse. On her wedding day she is attacked by Albert's oldest son who is still grieving for his dead mother and does not wmt a new one:

He pick up a rock and laid my head open. The blood run al1 down tween my breastç. His daddy say Don't do that! But that's al1 he say. He got four children . . . The girls hair ain't been comb since their mammy died. . . . So afler 1 bandage my head best 1 can and cook dinner . . . 1 start mgto untangle hair. (Waiker, Color 13) When Nettie runs away fiom home to escape Alphonso, who is planning to rape her as well, she cornes to stay with Celie, only to be subjected to Aibert's sexual advances too. Albert punishes Celie for protecting Nettie by sending Nenie away. Celie still manages to look out for Nettie by giving her the name of the reverend whose wife Celie saw with baby Olivia in the store because "[slhe the only woman I even seen with money" (Walker, Color 19). As in Their Eyes Were Watching God, economics are key in The Color Purple. Money equals power and it offers Nettie an opportunity to escape the inherited abuses of her life. The Reverend Samuel and his wife Corrine offer her a job doing missionary and teaching work in Afiica with them and Celie's two babies. Albert, out of spitefûiness, hides dl Nettie's letters to Celie until Celie supposes she is dead and feels that she herself is dead also, as a result of her life of abuse: "[Albert] beat me like he beat the children. Cept he don? never hardly beat them. .. . 1 make myself wood. 1 say to myself, Celie, you a tree. That's how corne 1 know trees fear man" (Walker, -Color 23). It is Celie's connection with nature through her identification with trees that signifies the beginning of her transformation, just as Janie first began to look towards the horizon following her identification with the pear tree. At this point, Celie is still following the patriarchal prescriptions for her life imposed on her by her upbringing, environment, and, above dl, by her rnarriage to an abusive partner. Not able to write to her sister Nettie, she *tes to God because her step father ordered her not to reveal the sexual abuse to which he subjected her to anyone but God; he ensures her complicit silence by adding the threat of matnarchal guilt: "lt'd kill yow mammy" (Walker, Color 1). Celie is naive in the sense that she knows no other way than what she has been taught via patriarchal culture. For example, Celie is jealous of Sofia's (Celie's stepson Harpo's wife) ability to fend for herself and has no outlet for her unexpressed anger about her own abusive situation. She tells Harpo, Albert's son, to de over Sofia with his fists because men have always ded over her. Celie begins to understand the importance of sisterhood and support within a community of women when Sofia confiants her about ber advice to Harpo (Walker, Color 37-44). Sofia forgives Celie and they begin the creative work of making a "Sister's Choice" quilt together. Life begins to change in significant ways with the arrivai of Shug Avery, a blues singer and Albert's sometime mistress. Celie's nrst glimmerings of sexual interest and lesbian awakening occur when she sees a photo of Shug before they meet: The most beautifid woman 1 ever saw. . . . 1 see her there in furs, Her face rouge. Her hair like somethin tail. She grinning with her foot up on somebody motorcar. Her eyes serious tho. Sad some. . . . now when 1 dream, I dream of Shug Avery. She be dress to kill, whirling and laughing. (Walker, Color 7) When they finally meet, Shug treats her as Albert does, saying, "You sure is ugly" (Wallcer, Color 48). Celie's initial attraction to Shug holds, however, and Celie begins to nurse Shug back to health. Celie is aroused by the sight of Shug in the bathtub: "First time 1 got the full sight of Shug Avery long black body with it black plum nipples, look like her mouth, 1 thought 1 had turned into a man" (Walker, Color 5 1). Celie's act of love in caring for the ailing Shug is reciprocated with the gifi of "Miss Celie's Song" which Shug says Celie helped "scratch out of [her] head (WaIker, Color 55). A more important gifi, however, is Shug's introduction of Celie to her own physical body "which was taken fkom her by men--fim by her brutal stepfather and then passed on to her husband, Albert" (Ross, "Celie in the Looking Glass" 70). In a frank discussion about sex, Shug learns that, despite having given birth to two babies, Celie is entirely naive about her own body. Celie looks at her blankly when Shug descnbes the orgasmic experience of sex:

Listen, she Say, right down there in your pussy is a little button that gits red hot when you do you know what with somebody. It gits hotter and hotter and then it melt. That the good part. But other parts good too . . . (WaIker, Color 8 1) Shug asserts that Celie is still a virgin, despite having had intercoune with a man and given birth to two children, by virtue of the fact that she has never had an orgasm. This redefinition undermines and threatens "patriarchal control over women's bodies, in that it places priority not on penetration, and thus on the social mechanism for guaranteeing ownership of children, but on enjoyment, making the woman's own response the index of her 'expenence"' (Hite, "Romance, Marginality, Matrilineage" 266). Shug directs Celie to look at her own genitalia for the first time and to admire its beauty : I lie back on the bed and haul up my dress. Yank dom my bloomen. Stick the looking gIass tween my legs. Ugh. Al1 that hair. Then my pussy lips be black. Then inside look like a wet rose. . . . 1 look at her and touch [my clitoris] with my fmger. A liale shiver go through me. Nothing much. But just enough to tell me this the right button to mash. Maybe. (Walker, Color 82)

Shug's gifl of the revelation and repossession of Celie's own body is the filst step in Celie's developrnent as a whole, individuated, and creative Anican American woman. As Daniel Ross notes,

To make a desire for selfhood possible, Celie must take a new perspective on her owa body. Rather than defining herself in terms of hgmentation or lack, she mut leam to define herself synecdochically, seeing part of her body, specifically her genitalia, as a ~~cientsymbol of herself as a whole. ("Celie in the Looking Glass" 446) Celie's revaluation of her body as "the site of self-awareness and selfesteem" reaches its zenith when Shug and Celie make love to each other: "Us kiss and kiss till us can't hardly kiss no more. Then us touch each other. . . . Then 1 feels something real sofi and wet on my breast, feel like one of my linle lost babies mouth. After a while, 1 act like a little lost baby too" (Byerman, "Desire" 32 1; Walker, Color 1 18). Rebom through this orgasmic experience and assured of her value as a physical body, Celie begins to assert her value in other areas, including her marriage to Albert. Celie no longer ignores or annihilates her own body as in the past when she imagined herself a tree so as not to feel Albert's assaults on her person. Celie's rejection of her role as "'the mule of the worlà'" within patriarchal society leads to a growing comection between Celie and other women, including Nettie (through her letters), Shug, Sofia, and Mary Agnes (Walker, In Search 232). 'Whereas before, Celie felt isolated in her abuse just as Janie did before other options were presented to Janie, Celie's identification with other women enables her to "break fiee from the masculine prohibition against speech and to join a community of women, thus fieeing herself fiom dependence on and subjection to male brutality" (Ross, "Celie in the Looking Giass" 71). Shug helps Celie fmd Nettie's letters which Albert has hidden fiom her. Strengthened by her reco~ectionwith her sister, Celie defies her stepfather's injunction to "tell nobody but God," rejects the patriarchal Father-God of her childhood, and begins addressing her letters to Nettie (Walker, Color 1). Celie says, "the God 1 been praying and writing to is a man. And aajust like al1 the other mens 1 know. Trifling, forgitfid and lowdown. . . . He big and old and ta11 and graybearded and white" (Walker, Color 199,201). Rather than reject religion altogether, Shug offers Celie a pantheistic concept of God and religion that Celie embraces because it embraces her as an important part of the universe:

God is inside you and bide everybody else. You come into the world with God. But oniy them that search for it inside find it. . . . 1 believe Cod is everything, Say Shug. Everythhg that is or ever was or will be. And when you can feel that, and be happy to feel th& you've found It. . . . My first step fiom the old white man was trees. Then air. Tken birds. Then other people. But one day . . . it come to me: that feeling of being part of everything, not separate at di. (Walker, Color 203) Shug informs Celie that if God is to be found in everything, then people "can't walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and dont notice it;" Shug's, and Walker's, concept of God is dl-inclusive (Waker, Color 202-203). Shug's plan of action for herself and her advice to other women is to "git man off

ber] eyeball" so women can begin to see the truth:

Man compt eve-g, Say Shug. He on your box of grits, in your head, al1 over the radio. He try to make you think he everywhere. Soon as you think he everywhere, you think he God. But he ain't. Whenever you trying to pray, and man plop himself on the other end if it, tell hlln to git lost, Say Shug. Conjure up flowers, wind, water, a big rock (Walker, -Color 202) The idea of having a man on one's eyeball refers to the male power strucnire, particdarly that of Caucasians, which makes al1 women, especially Afncan Amencan women, the "mule[s] of the world," as explained in chapter one of this thesis (Waiker, In Search 232). Celie begins to conjure up elements of nature to use in her effort to "git man off ber] eyeball'' and fmds that she is, in fact, very angry to discover that man-in particular, the men in her life-is on her eyeball: "1 hardly pray at dl. Every time I conjure up a rock, 1 throw it. Amen" (Wallcer, Color 204).

Angry, Celie combats murderous thoughts and desires to kill Albert to revenge his abusive treatment of her over the years when she discovers Albert has been hiding

Nettiers letters from her: "Al1 day long 1 act just like Sofia. 1 stutter. 1 mutter to myself. 1 stumble about the house crazy for Mr.- blood. In my mind, he falling dead every which a way. By time night corne, 1 can't speak (Walker, -Color 125). She even considers slicing Albert's throat with the razor while she shaves his face. Also, her anger toward Albert stifles her sexual desire for Shug, but Shug suggests that she channel her anger into a creative, positive, and self-affirming activity: sewing. Shug's suggestion that Celie begin sewing a pair of pants for herself subverts traditional male and fernale dress codes and, initially, Celie can not make sense of it: "What I need pants for? 1 say. 1 ain't no man"

(Walker, Color 152). The material for the fmt pair comes fiom an old myuniform formerly wom by Odessa's husband, Jack-an interesting gender reversal as that first pair becomes Celie's battle uniform in her efforts to get "man off her eyeball"; her new creative endeavors Save her nom going crazy: "A needle and net a razor in my hmd, 1 think" (Walker, Color 153). Celie's sewing gives her the potential for complete economic inde pendence kom Albert and enables her to leave the marriage. The next step in self-discovery for Celie, hawig already claimed her physical body and denlanguage, is to reclaim oral language which she does in a dramatic scene where Shug announces that she and Celie are leaving for Memphis together. In a scene reminiscent of the scene when Janie Crawford idomis Jody Starks that he looks "lak de change uh life," Celie hds her voice, her "killing tool," and tells Albert as well as the other men at the table her truth-a tmth that silences Albert (Huston, Their Eyes 75, 176):

You a Iowdown dog is what's wrong, 1 say. It's time to leave you and enter into the Creation. And your dead body just the welcome mat 1 need. . . . You took my sister Nettie away fiom me, 1 Say. And she was the only person love me in the world. . . . But Nettie and my children coming home soon, 1 Say. And when she do, al1 us together gon whup your ass. . . . I never ast you for nothuig. Not even for your sorry hand in marriage. (Waker, Color 207-209) Celie also speaks to Harpo on behalf of Sofia, which enables Sofia to speak up for herself. In addition, Celie's speech empowers Mary Agnes to daim her own name and to leave Harpo to follow her dream to sing. The next day when the women leave for Memphis, it is apparent that Albert has not yet realized that he no longer has power over her; he says, "You black, you pore, you ugly, you a woman. Goddam, he say, you nothin at dl" (Walker, -Color 213). Celie cunes-conjures-Albert, using her newfound power of speech and draws strength from her connection with nature:

1 cme you, 1 Say. . . . Until you do right by me, 1 say, everythmg you even dream about will fail. 1 give it to him straight, just like it come to me. And it seem to come to me fkom the trees. . . . Every lick you hit me you will saer Mice, I Say. Then 1 Say, You better stop taiking because al1 I'm telling you ain't coming just fiom me. Look like when 1 open my mouth the air rush in and shape words. . . . A dust devil flew up on the porch between us, fill my mouth with dirt. The dirt say, Anything you do to me, already done to you. (Walker, Color 21 3-214) Without the interference of "man on the eyeball," Celie is able to connect directly with nature and is able to draw strength from it. Settled in Shug's house in Memphis and proprietor of Folkspants, Unlimited, Celie continues to write letters to Nettie: "1 am so happy. I got love, I got work, 1 got money, Wends, and time. And you dive and be home soon. With our children" (Walker, Color 222). Soon afterward, Celie inherits her mother's house when her step-father, whom she knew as her father, dies. Now Celie has complete financial independence. Additionally, Celie's curse on Albert cornes to pas, and Albert eventually realizes that

"meanness kill[s];" he begins to take care of himself and the house &er living in squalor for a time, he retums the remainder of Nettiers letters to Celie, and they forge a platonic friendship fiom the rem* of an abusive maniage. As a result of her reconnection with Nettie, Celie is able to teach Albert that the gender roles they have always subscribed to are not fixed; Celie teaches Albert to sew and he begins to make shirts to go with Celie's

Celie's fmai letter reveals a sense of completion: "Dear God. Dear stars, dear tree, dear sky, dear peoples, Dear Everything" (Walker, Color 292). The culmination of the novei is Celie's reunion with her estranged family: Nettie and her two adopted children,

Olivia and Adam. She also welcomes Nettiers husband, Samuel, and Adam's wife, Tashi. Ultimately, Celie's life parallels that of Janie Crawford in Their Eyes Were Watching -God. As seen, both women speak in--and their authos claim-the African American vemacular. Both women begin their lives as poor African Amencan women nom the South (much like Huston and Walker) and are subject to similar racial and sexual abuses arising out of the history of slavery. Both are treated by men as "mule[s] of the world" and many these men, yet their comection with nature and with other women empowers them to reject their statw as "mules" and to reject their marriages to men who treat hem as such. Walker's revisionhg of the stom in Their Eyes Were Watching God as the anger Celie feels as an oppressed and abused acanAmerican woman adds a new twist to Hurston's original plot as it makes the possibility of an alternative sexuality acceptable for Celie and beyond reproach fiom the men in Celie's Me. Celie submitted for a time in her relationships with her step-father, Alphonso, and her husband, Albert, but eventually, "like a queen/ pace[d] the floor" and gained life experience only to learn that she is a complete, individual, and valued person who plays a significant role in nature. Janie's visions of the pear tree and the horizon, representing sexual füifillment and the anainment of selfhood respectively, are realized as a result of her rejection of patriarchal deas represented by her relationships with men and through her return to a community of women. Likewise, Celie's attainment of selfhood and sexual self- possession is the result of her comection with the women in her comrnunity ; she rejects patriarchal deby standing up to Albert and angrily asserthg herself: "Ifs time to leave you and enter into the Creation" (Waker, Color 207). Both Janie and Celie embrace this pantheistic vision of wholeness and are able to overcome and heal fiom the abuses of patriarchy as a result. Chapter 3:

Alice Walkefs Possessing the Secret of Joy: A Healing

"On Stripping Bark From Myself"

Because women are expected to keep silent about their close escapes 1 wiii not keep silent

.** No. 1 am finished with living for what my mother believes for what my brother and father defend for what my lover elevates for what rny sister, blushing, denies or rushes to embrace.

I find my own small person a standing self against the world an equality of wills 1 finally undentand

Besides:

My struggle was dways against an inner darkness: I carry within myself the only known keys to my death- to unlock life, or close it shut forever. A woman who loves wood grains, the color yellow. and the sun, 1 am happy to fight al1 outside murderers as 1 see 1 rnust,

(Walker, Her Blue Body 270-271) Alice Walker's most recent novel, Possessing the Secret of by, picks up on the thernes of women's autonomy, economic oppression, and the struggle for selfhood thmugh comection with the community as discussed in both Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and Walker's The Color Purple. The novel expands these issues fiom the Afncan American community in the American South to the broader arena of the ecan world, and in particular, to the fictional Afncan community of Olinka. Possessing the Secret of Joy expands the focus on women's personal and political power and women's sexual autonomy brought up in Their Eyes Were Watching God and Walker's previous novels. Walker does this by drawing attention to a serious social issue, female genital mutilation, or FGM, an issue that widens the scope of interest from previous novels to include women's health and persona1 rights as well. Waker, as a well-known author, uses her position and influence to wield political influence on the issue of FGM. She would like to see the practice eradicated and 1, as a result of this study, am in agreement. First, I will examine the nature and history of FGM in order ta gain a complete understanding of it; given this framework 1 will investigate Tashi's expenence and the consequences of FGM for her as a means of discovenng the ways in which Walker's political agenda informs her writing. There are some stylistic similarities between Possessing the Secret of Joy and Their Eyes Were Watching God which reveal that Hurston's writing continues to influence her work, even after sixteen books of poetry and prose. Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God is written in fiee indirect discourse, enabling Hurston to write using "direct, indirect, or fkee indirect means" in order to partake of Hurston's 'word pictures,' and 'thought pictures' . . . as [Hunton] defined the nature of Afro-Amencan spoken language," to create a medial language which permits both standard English as well as the use of acanAmerican vemacular (Johnson and Gates, "Black and Idiomatic" 84- 85). Following the example set by Hurston in Their Eyes Were Watching Go& Waker 79 wrote The Color Pqle using the Afncan American vemacular as well. However, to

the stov more intimate and immediate to the reader, Waiker chose an epistolary style which pemiined her to write the intimate thoughts of Celie in particular, as well as her sister Nettie; in real life, Celie would not have had an outlet, nor, likely, the education, for that kind of self-expression. In Possessing the Secret of Joy Walker takes a new approach to the epistolary style. It is as if the individual characters-Adam, Olivia, Tashi, Evelyn, M'zee, M'Lissa, Bentu Moragd Benny, Lisette, and Piemare al1 writing letters to the reader, although they are not addressed as such. The chapter titles are titied with the name of the speaker. These letters are not received by the reader in the order of the events contained therein, so the reader is faced with the challenge of putting the events in order as well as decipherïng the meaning of the letters, and judging the validity of the contents therein.

In Possessing the Secret of Joy, Tashi, a minor character in The Color Purple, becomes the focus of attention. In The Color Purple, Tashi is fmt introduced through Nettie's letters to Celie as Olivia's childhood fiiend. In Possessing the Secret of Joy, more information about Tashi is supplied. In this work, the main character, Tashi, an Afncan woman who has lived in Amenca most of her adult life, rehuns to Africa and is challenged with overcomuig madness, the source of which lies in her childhood. As a young woman in Africa, she undergoes a procedure known as female genital mutilation, or FGM, an experience that cuts her off fiom her sexual self and threatens to destroy her mentally. Her role as victirn in an androcentric society that insists on the mutilation of its females as a means of maintainhg its position of power will be discussed as well. To remedy this irreparable physical damage, she enters intensive psychodysis and is treated by several unnamed Jungian analysts, an Anican Arnerican psychologist,

Raye, and Car1 Jung himself. Jung was born in Switzerland, educated in Zurich, and deeply interested in the human psyche, myth, archetypes, and cultural anthropology. The inclusion of Jung as a character adds an interesting dimension to this story about an Afiican-Arnerican woman stmggling to corne to terms with the cultural traditions of her homeland Tashi's role as a psychologicaily wounded individual-much like the wounding of Waker's eye-and her subsequent healing via Jungian psychoanalysis, as well as her efforts to reclaim creative expression and fmd her own voice are the main focus of this section. This healing is a reflection of Walker's own experience of healing, and it echoes hieand Celie's processes of self4iscovery.

When Nettie, Samuel, Corrine, and Celie's children, Olivia and Adam, first arrive in the Afkican village of Olinka, Tashi is portrayed as a srnail crying child in a group of welcorning Olinkans; she disappears soon after their anival. As Samuel notes, "there could be no community in which there was one unhappy child" and he asks the question that pervades the entire novel: "Why was the little girl crying?" (Walker, Possessing 7-

8). For the moment, al1 that is revealed is that the sarne moniing they "arrived in the village one of Tashi's sisters had died. Her narne was Dura, and she had bled to death" (Walker, Possessing 8). The cause of Dura's death is unknown to the reader, but Tashi's experience of her sister's death traumatizes and scars her, closing her off on a psychic level. Over the course of the novel, we learn through a number of speakers of the events leading to Tashi's psychological breakdown as well as the process of heaiing that takes place to repair the damage done to her as the result of the Afncan tradition as it is experienced by her and imposed on her by her culture. The initial clue about Dura's death and the hint that, pnor to her achial death, the day of her death was a reason to celebrate, forces the reader to begin asking the same questions that Tashi asks about the traditions of the Olinkan culture. Unfortunately, Tashi does not ask those questions as a child and it is not until she is grown that the things she has forgotten begin to creep back into her subconscious. In Jungian terms, this is significant because midde age is a period during which an individual's outward focus tums inward in a search for rneaning; "cultural, philosophical, and spirituai values" become important and the individual attempts to "expand [her] conscious grasp of the unconscious that is master of [her] fate" (Hergenhahn, An Introduction 75; Roper, "Robertson" 36). Waker takes Hunton's words at the beginning of Their Eyes Were Watching -God to a new, psychologicai level in Possessing the Secret of ky: Now, women forget al1 those things they donnt want to remember, and remernber everything they don't want to forget. The dream is the mth. Then they act and do things accordingly. (Hurston, Their Eyes 1) Traumatized, Tashi does not want to remember her sistefs death or the circumstances surrounding it. The reader is given few details about the event either, other than the fact that Dura

had been very excited during the period leading up to her death. Suddenly she had become the center of everyone's attention; every day there were gifts. Decorative items mainly: beads, bracelets, a bundb of dried hema for reddening hair and palms, but the odd pend and tablet as well. Bright remnants of cloth for a headscarf and dress. The promise of shoes! (Walker, Possessing 9)

The mysterious event Tashi chooses to forget is the initiation ceremony perfomed on al1 young Olinkan girls, often referred to as female cïrcumcision, but more accurately described as female genital mutilation, or FGM.

Although the issue of FGM is discussed within the context of a novel, Walker's interest in FGM is serious as she is Uiterested in the abolishment of the practice in al1 cultures. In order to gain an understanding both of the passion she has for her mbject as well as its significance within the novel, it is useful to examine briefly the nature of FGM and its history. The fm mention of FGM in The Color Purple is an oblique one; Nettie writes Celie that "the one rihial they do have to celebrate womanhood is so bloody and painful, 1 forbid Olivia to even think about it" (Walker, -Color 195). Later Dons Baines, a wealthy white woman missionary, remarks that the Afkicans are good parents except for "a bit of bloody cutting around puberty"; she hopes that an Afiican woman she has educated will educate the Afncans of the need to eradicate FGM (Waiker, -Color 237). This indicates Walker's political interest in FGM's eradication as early as 1982 when The Color Purple was published. This "bit of bloody cutting" exists in three main foms: "Sunna is the procedure where the prepuce (wood) or tip of the clitons is cut. Eccision involves removing the entire clitoris and dl or part of labia minora. Infibulation is the scraping away of the entire extemal genitaiia-the clitons, labia majora and labia minora." (Mak, "Female Genital Mutilation" 10). The latter and most severe form is also known as Pharaonic circumcision and results in a period of heding during which

[t]he legs are bound together so that the raw areas adhere and heal across the lower end of the vagina leaving a flattened vulva without the labia, and a middle scar stretching almost to the perineum. . . . the legs have been bound together for as long as forty days. . . . The urethra is hidden and complete closure of the vulva is prevented by the insertion of a small piece of wood, often a matchstick. nius the normal urinary and vaginal openings are replaced by a srnaIl openhg in the sealed scar. . . . the opening mut be enlarged for semai intercoune . . . [as well as] childbirth. (Sanderson, Against the Mutilation 13- 16) These procedures are undergone by girls as young as six. The day of the operation is celebrated by the girl's cornmunity and she is generally showered with gifts and specid foods just as Dura was the day she was genitally mutilated. However, jm as Dura haemorrhaged to death as a result of female genital mutilation, there are many consequences to FGM which affect women's health in serious ways, including:

"pain;" "haemorrhage;" "shock;" dysuria ("acute urinary retention") due to "fear of passing urine on the raw genitaiia," "damage to the urethra and its surroundhg tissue;" dysmenorrhoea [painful menstruation] caused by scar 83 tissue blocking the opening of the vagina; "labial adhesion;" HaematocoIpos ("accumulated mens& blood of mauy monWyears in the vagina"); "urinary Uifection" fiorn "urine retention," "the use of msterilized equipment and the application of local dressings of cowdung and ashes;" "septicaemia (blood poisoning)" [caused by same as above]; "fever" caused by "septicaemia," urine retention, and lack of antibiotics to fight infection; "tetanus" due to lack of sterïlized instruments and dressings; "cysts and abscesses" forming in vulva as a result of Infibulation in particuir, "Dyspareunia or painfui intercourse: tight vaginal opening or pelvic infection and injury to the vuiva area caused by repeated vigorous sexual acts;" "death" due to "shock, haemorrhage, tetanus, lack of availability of medicd services." (Koso-Thomas, Circumcision, xii-xüi, 265) A more recent consequence of FGM is the risk of acquiring HIV infection through the repeated use of unsterilized instruments in this bloody surgery (Dorkenoo and Elworthy, Female Genital Mutilation 9). From a heaith standpoint, these reasons would seem suficient to bring an end to the tradition of FGM. However, history makes it more dificult to quickly abolish FGM on the substantial grounds of health issues alone.

FGM is a cultural tradition that has existed for as long as 6000 years, dating back to the tirne of the ancient Egyptians; it persists today in as many as twenty-eight Afican nations, as well as parts of Asia, and the tradition continues in "immigrant communities in the United States, Canada, Europe, and Adia"(Rowley, "Worldwide Ban" A2). Despite laws banning it in more "civilized" countries, practitionen fiom the individual cultures themselves ensure that the practice is continued in its new country. The World Health Organization estimates that more than two million women and girls undergo the procedure each year and that 80 million AfÎican women and "85 million to 1 15 million women [worldwide] have had their genitals mutilated" (Dorkenoo and ELworthy, Female Genital Mutilation 35; Rowley, "Worldwide Ban" A2). The continuation of the practice relies on the perpetuation of a number of beliefs which Vary depending on the specific ethnic or social group one studies. For example, in Egypt, infibulation is practised as to MUa "religious obligation prescribed in the hadith of the Prophet Mohammed" (Kennedy, "Circumcision" 181). In Mali, Kenya, Sudan and Nigeria, it is believed that the clitoris is "an aggressive organ, threatening the male organ, and even endangering the baby during delivery. In some areas, notably Ethiopia, people believe that if the female genitals are not excised, they will ciangle between the legs like a man's" (Dorkenoo and Elworthy, Female Genital Mutilation 13). Echoing these myths, Walker asserts that Tashi, like al1 Olinkans, believes the ancient myth that if a womau is not circumcised, "her unclean parts wodd grow so long they'd soon touch her thighs; she'd become masculine and arouse herself. No man could enter her because her own erection wouid be in his way" (Walker, Possessing 121). 4 In polygamous societies, there is a common fear among men that if their many wives' clitorises are not excised, they will be unable to satisq their heightened libidos (Levin, "Women as Scapegoats" 217). Additionally, Freud's concept of the vaginu dentata, or toothed vagina, as a threat to male sexuaiity is supported by a vast number of legends. folk tales, and myths derived fiom a variety of cultures and countries, dl of whkh assert that "if the clitoris is not excised it will grow razor-sharp teeth and engulf and eat up the penis" (Walker and Parmar, Wamior Marks 110). Pratibha Parmar points out that the

"Bambara concept of the clitoris [is] a dagger" while the Toba "view it as a residual tooth, presurnably alI that remains of the toothed vagina" (Walker and Pamiar, Wanior

Marks 110). Parmar asserts that these myths serve but one purpose: "to destroy women's right to autonomous sexuality in order to accommodate male fears and desires." (Walker and Pannar, 1 10). These and other associated myths reveal an underlying fear of female sexuality and a patriarchai desire to wield control over woments bodies. Sociologist Bruno Beîtelheim argues that, at FGM's origin, men were envious of women's "procreative function" and desired "to acquire power over the vagina and the dangerous menstrual blood" : Ritual defloration may be underlain by similar psychological mechanisms, including men's desire to demonstrate counterphobically that they have the power to make women bleed from the vagina and to deny both thek fear and envy by exercising dominance over the vagina (Symbolic Wounds 120- 12 1)

He suggests that male circumcision rihials evolved out of men's desire to copy menstruation by ritually scarifjmg their own genitals, that is, male circumcision, in order to gain the power over promation which women hold within their bodies. These rituais, not having the desired result, led men to impose a ritual scarification ceremony on women which gives men control over women's bodies and expresses their "anger at and envy of women's ability to bear children when man cannot" (Bettelheim, Symbolic

Wounds 123). The ritual in some societies (for example, the Liberian Poro) of male ingestion of the excised clitoris possibly indicates either a "hostile desire to take away fiom the other sex, or the envious desire to possess the incorporated parts" (Betteiheim, Symbolic Wounds 100-20 1). While the above analysis reveals at least part of the psychological origins of FGM, other explmations for the practice are given. Sorne of these include: " [mlaintenance of cleanliness," " [plursuance of aesthetics," " [plrevention of still births in primigravida" [fïrst pregnancy], " [plromotion of social and political CO hesion," " lplrevention of promiscuity," " [ilmprovement of male sexual performance and pleasure," " [ilncrease of matrimonial opportunities," " [mlaintenance of good health," "[plreservation of virginity," and the " [elnhancement of fertility" (Koso-Thomas, Circumcision 5). The backbone of the majority of these reasons is the practice of FGM as a means of controlling female sexuality and morality. As Robin Morgan and Gloria

Steinem point out: "Infibulation creates the ultimate chastity belt, one forged out of the woman's own flesh" (Favaaa, Bodies Under Siege 162). An infibulated woman is cut open at marriage to facilitate intercourse with her husband, cut Mer to enable childbirth, and often reinfibulated more than once (usually after childbirth) to recreate, physically at least, a state of chastity. As Rose Oldfield Hayes points out, in Sudan, as in many Afncan countries, "virgios are made, not born" ("Female Genitai Mutilation" 622). Nahid Toubia, Sudan's fkst woman surgeon and an anti-FGM activist, describes FGM as "'an extreme example of efforts common to societies around the world to suppress women's sexuality, ensure their subjugation and control their reproductive functions"' (Rowley, "Worldwide Ban" A2). Cultural relativism is important here, because while Western culture perceives FGM as barbaric and uncivilized, it fails to recognize its own "psychic and physical mutilations:" "unwanted hysterectomies, endless face-lifts, liposuction, bulimia, anorexia, siIicone breast implants-dl in the pursuit of youthfulness and an ever-changing notion of the ideal woman (Walicer and Parmar, Warrior Marks 109). In fact, clitondectomy, the excision of the clitoris, was routinely performed beginning as early as 1858 in Europe and in the 1860s in the United States as a cure for vaxious 'illnesses' afffecting women, including "aberrant behavior," "inçanity," "masturbation, nyrnphomania, epilepsy, hysteria, and other disorders thought to be caused by female sexuality" (Paige, Poiitics 266). To Victorian society and especially to the medical community, "the clitoris was so unimportant to a normal woman as to not be missed if removed, yet lurking in its tissue was the greatest threat to female welfare ever known." (Sheehan, "Victorian Clitondectomy" 12). Echoing the patriarchal mores of Afncan society which reduced wornen's sexual role to that of fulfilling the man's needs and producing children, G. J. Barker-Benfield asserted that, in American culture at least,

female genital surgery was an attempt to define women's social status in a changing economy and that both male and female slavery served to enforce the principle that sexuality was solely for the production of children and that women's sole fiuiction was to reproduce. Genital surgery also expressed the American ethos of ambition, individualism, and self control. . . .the ideology of controlling sexual energies developed to help men direct their mentai energies toward work and achievement, and to prevent women fiom distracthg men nom their ambition through sexual demands. (Paige, Politics 267) The advancernent of science and the correspondhg loss of belief in witchcraft to explain various illnesses played a role in the reliance on the new science of psychology to explain human sexuality and behaviour. The father of modem psychoIogy, Sigmund Freud, posited that, over the course of one's psychological development and the development of fernininity, clitoridean sexuality must be eliminated, essentidly castrathg women and "denying them the sexual agency and active power that would make them sexual subjects in their own right" (Be~ett, "Critical Clitondectomy" 249-250). Freud recornmended clitoridectomy because it removed the possibility of experiencing sexual satisfaction through masturbation and forced the woman "to enjoy only vaginai sexuality" via intercourse with a man (Bettelheim, Symbolic Wounds 252-254). The removal of a wornan's clitoris, the common denominator of al1 types of

FGM, focuses any sexual activity a woman takes part in on satisfying the man's sexual desires only. Olayinka Koso-Thomas explains that infibulation altes the female genitalia from a sexual organ to a nanow orifice; the woman is merely a vehicle by which the male's sexual enjoyment is made paramount (Circumcision 9). Lust and sexual desire in a woman are unacceptable, making her unclean and an improper wife and rnother (Favana, Bodies Under Siege 162). Janet Boddy explains the aesthetic of "enciosedness" as seen by practitioners of FGM, and especially of infibulation, as a means of ensuring what is conceived of as a state of cleanliness or purity:

Infibulation purifies, smoothes, and makes clean the outer surface of the womb, the enclosure of the home of childbirth, it socializes or culturalizes a woman's fertility. Through occlusion of the vaginal orifice, her womb, both literally and figuratively, becomes a social space: enclosed, impe~ous,virtually impenetrable. ("Wornb as Oasis" 696) In Possessing the Secret of Joy, the Olinka culhire refer to FGM as "bathing" and M'Lissa refers to Tashi's wound "not as a wound but as a healing," implying that, without FGM, Tashi is unclean and her genitais are the wound that needs to be "healed" by FGM (Wallcer, Possessing 246, 63). The aesthetic of purity and encloseciness created by FGM reinforces the notion that a girl's genitals are impure, disgusting, and require alteration in order for the girl to become a valuable part of society. Wolf, arguing that aesthetics of beauty are products of patriarchy, makes this assessment: "The beauty myth is always actually prescribing behavior and not appeamnce" (Beauty Myth 14). FGM continues because a woman's econornic sumival in many of these cultures depends on her gening rnamed and gaining value by producing childten; "whatever will make her more marriageable becomes desirable" (Morgan and Steinem, Outrageous Acts 335). This economic exchange is interesthg when one considers that FGM is a practice imposed on women by men, but perpetuated by women themselves, often by mothen on their own daughters. Sanice Boddy asserts that "[i]nfibulation is an assertive and symbolic act, controlled by women in which the womb becomes a social space-- enclosed, guarded, and impervious" (Gordon, " Female C ircumcision" 1 1). In these cultures, women are only as valuable as their ability to bear and rear children. If FGM is made a pre-condition to marriage and childbirth as a means of asserting male control over female reproductive power, then to violate that pre-condition is to uproot one of the basic tenets of that society. There is no alternative but to perpetuate the practice of FGM if a woman or her daughters are to survive in that society. As Gruenbaum notes, "female circurncision forms part of a complex sociocdturai arrangement of fernale subjugation in a strongly patrilineal, paûiarchal society. . . . women who carry out the practice, and who are its strongest defenders, must be analyzed in terms of their weaker social position"

("Movement Against Clitoridectomy" 5). Women object to changing the practice because they fear for their own as well as for their children's social and economic futures. For example, the role of midwife, as portrayed by M'Lissa in Possessing the Secret of Joy, is one of the few acceptable paid employments available for women in many of these corntries. The midwife, usudly an older woman, had the duties of facilitating both childbirth and FGM. Because the administration of FGM makes a young girl valuable as a friture wife and mother, the practice reinforces the goals and values of the society; thus, the position of midwife is greatIy esteemed and respected within the community and puts her in a position to influence other women to have the practice done to their daughters. The lack of value placed on women in Walker's fictional Olinkan society, as is the case in niay real Afiican societies, is portrayed several ways. When Olivia wonden why her fiiend Tashi is not allowed to go to school with her, she leams that Olinkan women are not educated because "[a] girl is nothing to herselc only to her husband can she become something" (Wdker, -Color 162). Tashi's mother receives the honorary and highly esteemed designaiion of "honorary man" &er producing five sons for her husband and the comrnunity; Tashi's efforts to please her father are futile because she is a girl and therefore valueless (Walker, Color 171)- Walker reveals in The Color Purple some of the ways in which and means by which the fictional African village of Olinka are challenged to change their views on women's roles. These changes are largely due to the encroaching outside world. The missionaries, as portrayed by Samuel, his wife Corrine, their adopted (and Celie's birth) children, Adam and Olivia, and Nettie, bring news of the outside world as well as difTerent cultural ideas as to how one should live. The advancement of the road (which al1 but destroys Olinkan faith in their roofleaf god) that connects growing modem Afncan cities also affects the tiny, formerly isolated village of Olinka. Tashi's eagemess to learn fiom Olivia and the missionaries while the knowledge of her own society fails to "really enter her soul" reveals that "Tashi knows she is leaming a way of life that she will never Iive" (Waiker, -Color 166). The independent and spirïted Tashi is compared to an aunt sold into slavery because she rebelled against viIIage traditions: "This aunt refbsed to marry the man chosen for her. Refused to bow to the chief' (Waiker, Color 166). A warning is there, however, revealing the consequence of rebelling against prescribed women's roles within fican society; beside being sold into slavery, Tashi's amt, it is clear, went insane also as she "[dlid nothing but lay up, crack cola nuts between her teeth and giggle" (Wallcer, Color 166). Olinkan society frowns on educating women and Tashi's father rejects the notion that Tashi, if educated, could one day be a teacher or a nurse. Despite Tashi's mother's support for Tashi being educated like the boys, her father suggests to Nettie that Olivia lem "what women are for," just as Tashi is being taught their traditional purpose at home. Nettie reveais the powerlessness of Olinkan women: "the husband has Iife and death power over the wife. If he accuses one of his wives of witchcraft or infidelity, she can be killed" (Walker, Color 172). While Olinkan women earn respect as they fulfill their communal role and modem African American women have increased oppomuiities to fulfill themselves as individuals, Wallcer does not let the reader forget that inequalities between men and women's roles exist in Afncan Amencan communities as well. Both

Olinkan and Afncan American men have similar ways of speaking to women; the men barely acknowledge the women's existence and the women do not dare to "look in a man's face" but instead "look at his feet or his knees" (Walker, Color 168). The innuence of the outside world begins to have a profound effect on the centuries-old village of Olinka and its views on women's roles and power. This is particularly tme as it pertains to African views on sexuality and the practice of the centuries-old tradition of female genital mutilation in Walker's novels. Education on FGM's dangers requires openness, however, and sexuality is dehitely a taboo subject among the fictional Olinkan people as well as many real Africans. In many Afiican societies where FGM is practised a woman is "conditioned to feel shame about sexuai matters . . . tradition has taught her that those most treasured values-health, fertility, and the welfare of eventual children-are especially threatened at such critical times as birth, circumcision, marriage, and menstruation" (Kennedy, "Circumcision" 182). Shame leads to ignorance and silence as the subject of sexuality is taboo and therefore never discussed or questioned, as noted by Koso-Thomas:

In Africa there is ignorance everywhere of feminine sexuality. The belief that female response to sexual stimuli should be suppressed, has discouraged interest in ferninine sexuality. Sex is taboo in most ecan societies and sex is never to be discussed even with one's own husband. It is un-Afi-ican to display love in public, both men and women feel embarrassed by it. ecan sexuality is supposed to be a gift for the procreation of the hurnan species; any outward display of emotion related to sexuality is interpreted as debasing a divine gift. (Circumcision 13) Tashi had no understanding of the destruction that would take place when she undement FGM; she was not even aware of what a woman's genitals are supposed to look like until afier she came to the United States. She says, "My own body was a mystery, as was the female body, beyond the function of the breasts, to almost everyone 1 knew" (Walker, Possessing 12 1). Yet despite general ignorance of the body's mysteries and the overall respect given to the taboo against sex, the influence of the modem world as identified in her relationship with Adam, causes Tashi to venture outside the boundaries set by Olinkan society. Tashi and Adam violate the Olinkans' strongest taboo by "making love in the fields;" Adam notes, "So strong was this taboo that no one in living memory had broken it. And yet we did. . . . lovernaking in the fields jeopardized the crops . . . no one ever saw us, and the fields produced their harvests as before" (Walker, Possessing 27). Even more serious, however, Adam had oral sex or cimnilingus, with Tashi, breaking the

Olinkan taboo against having sex solely for pleasure, that is, with no reproductive 92 PurPose- Adam ~memberslyhg "on my beliy between her legs, my cheeks caressed by the gentle rhyihms of her thighs. My tongue bringing us no babies, and to both of us delight. This way of loWig, mong her people, the greatest taboo of dl" (Walker, Possessing 28). It is unclear whether Adam and Tashi break these taboos because Adam is not Olinkan and therefore not subject to its traditions and taboos or because Olh society is changing as a result of "civilization." As a result of the encroaching road on the village of Olinka, life begim to change. While initially the road builders and the road are welcomed, many Olinkans' views change when they see the ramifications of Western civilization. Olinka loses its former way of life as the road splits the village in half, a physical division that mimon the psychic split that takes place in the Olinkan people. This split is most visible in the development of a group of rebels called the Mbeles. Angry that the road builders forced the Olinkan village to move away fiom their water source and disheartened at the eradication of roofleaf, a plant the Olinkan people see as their god, many Olinkans "ran away to join the mbeles or forest people, who live deep in the jungle, refusing to work

for whites or be ded by them" (Walker, Color 234). Tashi, like many Olinkans who wish to "show they still have their own ways . . . even though the white man has taken

everything else," decides to resist these changes; to si&@ her solidarity as a people, Tashi decides to have two traditional mutilations done: facial scarification to identiQ herself with her tribe and the "female initiation ceremony" (Walker, -Color 245). Peer pressure plays a significant role in Tashi's ultimate decision to undergo FGM as an adult. Dura's death as a result of FGM is the probable reason that Tashi did not undergo the FGM operation at age eleven and survives, genitds iotacf until she

reaches addthood. At the thne when the rihial should have taken place, the Olinkan village chief, pressured by Christian white missionaries to stop FGM (perceived by outsiders as barbarie) agrees not to enforce the tradition. However, M'Lissa, the Olinkan

93 midwife and practitioner of FGM and an unmarried woman with no other hanCid means of survival, has an economic interest in perpetuating the tradition. In addition, Dura and Tashi's mother, Nafa, wants to ensure the mmiageability of her daughten. Knowing that Samuel, Nettie, and Corrine were African American missionaries and yet seeing them only as fican, she felt that the tradition would be re-established; she "could not imagine a black person that was not Olinkan" and who would not follow OIinkan traditions (Walker, Possessing 257). Unfortunately, Dura is a hemophiliac; her wound will not heai, her blood cannot clot, and she bleeds to death. Tashi does not undergo FGM as a child but she pays a price for being different. The other village children tease her and make her feel like an outsider: "My uncircumcised vagina was thought of as a monstrosity. They laughed at me. Jeered at me for having a tail. I think they meant my labia majora. Mer dl, none of them had vaginal lips; none of them had a clitoris; they had no idea what these things looked Iike; to them

I was bound to look odd (Walker, Possessing 121). As an adult, Tashi remaùis an outsider in Olinkan culture. Not only is she uncircumcised which makes her an wife and mother to an Olinkan man, she is dso the friend of an Afiican American missionary family (and is therefore a potential traitor to her own people) and the wife of a non-Olinkan, American man, Adam. When in America, she feels alienated from herself and her culture: "My body had lefi. My sou1 had not" (Walker, Possessing 116). When in Afirica, she still feels that she is not truly Olinkan and so she accepts Our Leader's admonishment to perpetuate the old traditions and decides to have FGM done. Raye, her psychologist, asks why Tashi would willingly give up the satisQing sex life she had with Adam and Tashi answers, "To be accepted as a real woman by the Olinka people; to stop the jeering. Otherwise 1 was a thing" (Walker, Possessing 122). Tashi wishes to change her position as an outsider, as Other, to become part of the dominant culture: "Completely woman. Completely African. Completely Olinka" (Waker, Possessing 64).

94 The consequences of both the facial s~~cationand FGM are devastating for Tashi both on a physical and psychic level, although she is able to recover fiom the former with the support of Adam. Mer undergoing the facial scarification, an operation often forced on the younger generation by the tribal elders, Nertie fmds Tashi considerably changed: "Shevdlost a considerable amount of weight, and seemed listless, ddlsyed and tired" (Walker, Color 285). Her face is swollen, red, and irritated and she is too ashamed to raise her head. She is even more ashamed when Adam proposes rnaniage to her and she refuses on the grounds that she will be considered a "savage" in any culture other than her own, especially in America. To show his support for her decision to Wear the traditional marks of her culture, Adam undergoes the facial scarification as well and they are married; at this point, they have reached a balance between their different cultures that brings them together as a couple. Mer undergoing FGM, Tashi is a changed woman. When a young Olinkan boy, Banse, leads Adam to Tashi in the Mbeles encampment, Tashi is lying down weaving gras mats. Adam remarks on the difference in her demeanor:

The fmt thing 1 noticed was the flatness of her gaze. It nightened me. . . . 1 could not tell if she was happy to see me. Her eyes no longer sparkled with anticipation. They were as flat as eyes that have been painted in, with a du11 paint. There were five small cuts in each side of her face, like the marks one makes to keep score while playing tic-tac-toe. Her legs, ashen and wasted, were bound. (Walker, Possessing 43-44)

Obviously, this is not a child's game of tic-tac-toe; Tashi is wounded, both physically and psychically. She is aware of the psychic change within herself, as seen when Adam cornes to find Tashi in the Mbele camp: "My eyes see him but they do not register his being. Nothing runr out of my eyes ro greet him It is as if my self is hiding behind an iron door" (Waiker, Possessing 45). When she left Olinka to join the Mbeles, Tashi describes herself astride a donkey as being "in the pose of a chief, a warrior" (Walker, Possessing 22). In her min& joining the resistance and participating in the ancient rituals of facial scarification and FGM wiU make her an Olinkan wat-rior, fighting for the rights of her oppressed people. Tashi believes that participating in these rituais will unite her with the other women memben of the resistance whom she sees as "strong, invincible," "tembly bold, tembly revolutionary and fiee" and "leaping to the attack" (Walker, Possessing 64). Unfortunately for Tashi, she does not realize her impotence as an agent of social and political change dlafter the facial scarification and FGM, acts which were to si@& her support of the Mbele resistance movement and to reaffirm the importance of Olinkan traditions. Instead of being transformed into the wornan warrior she had hoped to become, she fmds that "her own proud wak had become a shuffle" (Walker, Possessing 65). Later, when angry enough to kill M'Lissa for betraying her and performîng FGM on her, she finds that her mutilated body prevents her fiorn taking any action: "1 am unabie to move. 1 look down at my feet. Feet that hesitate before any nonflat surface: stairs, hills. Feet that do not automatically or nirnbly leap over puddles or step gracefully ont0 curbs" (Walker, Possessing 224). In reality, there is no opportunity within the Olinkan social structure for a woman to play a significant sociai or political role other than those of wife and mother. Tashi thinks the women's role in the Mbele camp is "to forage for food and to conduct raids agaiwt the plantations," and "to recruit new warrïors" (Walker, Possessing 64). However, Adam never sees any of these women in the camp other than Tashi and M'Lissa, the circumciser, and WLissa later confesses that what Tashi believed was, in fact, a lie: "It was the camp itself that needed liberation. When the wornen carne they were expected to cook and clean-and be screwed-exactly as they had been at home. When they saw how things were, they lefi" (Wallcer, Possessing 244). In the Mbeles' effort to recowtnict "a traditionai Olinkan village from which to fight," they sent for MZissa, the tsunga, or circumciser, and Tashi, an uncircumcised woman on which to 96 impose iradition (Walker, Possessing 244). Unwittingly, Tashi buys into the Mbeles' need to reassert Olinkan traditions because she feels pressure to fit in. There are other physicd ramifications of FGM for Tashi. Unnation and menstruation are extremely painful and last longer than nomal, and the latter is accompanied by two weeks per month of prernenstd cramps and a soured blood odor that makes her want to remain "completely hidden fkom humau contact, virtually buried" (Walker, Possessing 67). Fear of being "held down and cut open" to give birth by cesarean section causes Tashi to decide to abort her first pregnancy, a daughter (Walker,

Possessing 224). Her second pregnancy is complicated as well. Sexual penetration was too painful for Tashi, but despite this fact and due to the "aggressive mobility of spem"

she becomes pregnant with Benny, also known as Bentu Moraga After an extremely difficult birth that leaves a "look of horrorlt on the obstetriciants face, Benny is bom:

The obstetncian broke two instruments trying to make an opening large enough for Bemy's head. Then he used a scalpel. Then a pair of scissoa used ordinarily to sever cartilage fkom bone. . . . penny's] head was yellow and blue and badly rnisshapen. . . . Benny, my radiant brown baby, the image of Adam, was retarded. Some small but vital part of his brain crushed by our ordeal. (Walker, Possessing 57,61) FGM has the Mereffect of preventing Tashi and Adam fYom having a normal sexual relationship, causing Tashi to run away fiom Adam altogether at one point (Walker, Possessing 99).

Tashi's psyche is fiactured as a result of FGM, as is evident in the chapter titles which indicate who is speaking; Tashi is "Tashi" the Olinkan, "Evelyn" the African Amencan, "Tashi-Evelyn-Mn. Johnsonf1 the Oliakan-American wife of Adam and mother of Benny, and either "Tashi-Evelyn" or "Evelyn-Tashi," depending on which culture appears to dominate. Findly, she is Tashi Evelyn Johnson Soul, revealing th& in the end, al1 the hctured parts of her psyche combine to make an unhyphenated whole. nie disintegration of Tashi's mental state begins at the moment of Dura's death as a consequence of FGM. Tashi nnds henelf depressed and plagued by a mystenous recunïng nightmare foiIowing Adam's affair with Lisette. Olivia, out of concem for Tashi's mental health, arranges with the help of Lisette for her to see a psychoanalyst in Switzerland who is also Lisette's uncle. Interestingly, there are numerou clues given to suggest that the psychoanalyst is, in fact, Carl Jung, former student of the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. In

1925 Jung went on safari to Afilca, visiting Kenya, Mount Elgon, and the Nile, and returned to Switzerland via Egypt in 1926, a journey evident in the decor of Tashi's psychoanalyst's office (Jung, Portable Jung mi):

This white witch doctor scribbles, only a Little, behind his desk, on which there are small stone and clay figures of Afncan gods and goddesses from Ancient Egypt. 1 noticed them before lying down on his couch, which is covered by a tribal mg. . . . Olivia has brought me here. Not to the father of psychoanalysis [Freud] . . . But to one of his sons, whose imitation of him-including dark hair and beard, Egyptian statuettes on his desk, the tribal-mg covered couch and the cigar, which smells of bittemess--dl perhaps cure me. (Walker, Possessing 10- 1 1) To offer further evidence of his identity as Carl Jung, Tashi's psychoanalyst writes in a letter to his niece, Lisette, that he has not been called "Mzee," meaning "Old Man," since "the natives of Kenya did so spontaneously" during his sojourn there "over a quarter of a century ago"; Jung went on safici to Africa, including Kenya, fkom 1925 to 1926 (Walker, Possessing 85; Jung, Portable Jung d).He wonders why, if Tashi is so adof the mystenous tower of her dreams, she is not also afraid of his "tunet/ tower," referring to an actual stone cade called The Tower which Jung began building in 1923 and retired to in 1947 in Bollingen, Switzerlaad near Lake Zurich, where Mzee takes Tshi and Adam sailing (Walker, Possessing 87, 71; Jung, Portable Jung &, di). Mzee signs his letter to Lisette, "Your uncle Carl" (Walker, Possessing 87). 98 Waker's choice of Car1 Jung, or Mzee as he will be refemed to in this thesis, as Tashi's psychoanalyst is significant because Jung's theory of the collective unconscious, as well as the importance of archetypes and archetypal myths and dreams, is key in

Tashi's process of psychic heahg. Tashi responds to Mzee because he represents "the exotic Western and European culture she so adores," while Mzee is able to realize, through Adam and Tashi's "othemess" as both Afncans and Americans, "a tdy universal self" :

An ancient self that thirsts for knowledge of the experiences of its ancient kin. Needs this knowledge and the feelings that corne with it, to be whole. A self that is homfied at what was done to Evelyn, but recognizes it as something that is also done to me. A tdy universal self. That is the essence of healing that in my European, "professional" life 1 fiequently lost. (Walker, Possessing 86) Mzee is effective as a therapist because he and Tashi are able to learn fiom each other and, in so doing, each cornes closer to achieving the ultimate goal of individuation or self-actualization, as it is termed in Jungian psychology. There are three levels to the psyche, according to Jung: first, consciousness; second, the peeonal unconscious, which is comprised of those things which have either lost their intensity and are forgotten, those things the conscious mind has repressed, or sense-impressions which were never fully registered with the conscious mind; and third, the collective unconscious. The collective unconscious as "the ancestral heritage of possibilities of representation, is not individual, but common to al1 men, and perhaps even to dl animals , and is the true basis of the individual psyche" (Jung, Portable Jung 38). It is represented and revealed by "archetypes or noms of myth" which are "patterns of instinctual behaviour" (Jung, Portable Jung 6 1).

Some of the archetypes Jung identified within the collective unconscious are those which comprise the elements of the human psyche. The goal of Jungian psychology is to "bring the archetypes of the persona, the anima, the shadow, and the 99 self into balance, resdting in self-acnialization" (Hergenhahn, An Introduction 71). The persona is the role in life consciously played by the individual while the anima and animus represent the "individual's true i~erself' (Mish, Merriam-Webste9s 867, 46). The anima is the "female component of the male psyche" resulting fkom the experiences men have had with women through the eons," while the animus is the comesponding male component of the female psyche (Hergenhahn, An Introduction 71). The "darkest, deepest part of the psyche" which "contains al1 of the animai instincts" is the shadow; it is "immoral, aggressive, and passionate" (Hergenhahn, An Introduction 71). Conscious examination of these archetypes of the psyche in an attempt to "know oneself' leads to self-actuaiization, or individuation, wherein the individual achieves a balance between the paired and contrasting human fiuictions of feeling and sensation, thinking and intuition (Jung, Portable Jung xxvii). Jung ais0 argued that, in the event that "the manner of life and thought of an individual so departs fÏom the noms of the species that a pathological state of imbalance ensues, of neurosis or psychosis, dreams and fantasies analogous to hpented myths will appear" (Jung, Portable Jung xxii). Jung believed that, rather than interpreting such dreams as the outcome of "repressed infantile mernories (reduction to autobiography)" as Freud had posited, one should compare those dreams "with the analogous mythic forms (amplification to mythology) so that the disturbed individual may leam to see himself depersonalized in the minor of the human spirit and discover by analogy the way to his own larger fulfillment" (Jung, Portable Jung xxii). In other words, individuation or self- actualization is achieved through identification with the collective unconscious as expressed by universal archetypes; the means of this identification is through analysis of both dreams and the products of the "'active imagination"' (Jung, Portable Jung 67). In Tashi's case, the repressed shadow part of her psyche reveals the hidden archetypes of the collective unconscious through her dreams as well as the products of her "active imagination": her fantasy life and her creative works. As a result of her traumatic childhood experience of Dura's death-a repressed memory-Tashi's psyche is unbalanced, a state evidenced by her repeated nightmarish dreams. Tashi's terrifjmg dreams, as "self-representations of the psychic life-process," indicate the disturbed state of her psyche (Jung, Portable Ju.76). It is not enough, however, to simply have the dream as an expression of psychic repression; it is important to consciously examine the dream in order to understand it and bring it out of that repressed state. Dreams, according to Jung, "are the natural reaction of the self- regulating psychic system and, as such, point forward to a higher, potential hedth, not simply backward to past crises" (Jung, Portable Jung xxii). To understand the drearn is to explore and bring into balance the repressed areas of Tashi's psyche; Mzee can offer a listening ear and an understanding of the nature of archetypes, dreams, and the inner workings of the psyche, but Tashi must do the psychic work; as Mzee tells Tashi and Adam: "You yourselves are your last hope" (Waker, Possessing 53). So terrified is she of what lies behind the locked door of her psyche, Tashi cannot bring herself to tell Mzee "about the dream 1 have every night that temfies me" (Walker, Possessing 25). However, upon awaking fiom one of her night terros, she tells Adam about it:

There is a tower, she says. 1think it is a tower. It is tail, but 1 am inside. 1 don? really ever know what it looks like from outside. It is cool at first, and as you descend lower and lower to where I'm kept, it becomes dank and cold, as well. It's dark. 'Ihere is an endless repetitive sound that is like the faint scratch of a baby's hgernails on paper. And there are millions of things rnoving amund me in the dark. 1 cannot see them. And they've broken my wings! 1 cm see them lying crossed in a corner like discarded oars. Oh, and they're forcing something in one end of me, and fiom the other they are busy puiling something out. 1 am long and fat and the color of tobacco spit. Gross! And I cmnot move! (Waker, Possessing 26-27) Tashi does not understand the dream at this point, but by telling Adam-who then tells Mzee and Lisette, who then tells the dream to Pierre-she begins the long task of discove~gits meaning and putting her unbalanceci psyche into balance as a result of her doctor-patient relationship with Mzee. Pierre, an anthropologist and the child of Adam and Lisette, is fascinated and obsessed with discovering the mystery of Tashi's drearn of the tower. Jung's pivotai work, Syrnbols of Transformation, argues that archetypes are "inherently expressive . . . of comrnon human needs, instincts, and potentials" and that "archetypal themes are displayed in the supporting myths of the culture" (Jung 1971, xxii). The apparent paaiarchal instinct of men to assert control over women's bodies is seen clearly in the myth of the termite hi11 in Possessing the Secret of Joy. This myth is also seen in the Noah Afican Dogon creation myth "in which the Creator God (male) cuts a termite hi11 syrnbolizing the female clitoris" (Sims, "Warrior Marks" 1). Nonetheless, Pierre determines that Tashi's dream is derived £iom an archetypal myth of this nature, despite the fact that it has never resided in her mind on a conscious level, but has remained an unconscious and temfiing part of her psyche's shadow. Just pnor to Tashi's execution, Pierre reveals the full import of her drearn of the dark tower. Pierre believes that the Dogon myth of God's creation of the world from clay evolved fiom observation and emulation of (in adobe houses and pottery making) the building techniques of the termite. If this evolution is possible, then it is plausible that the role of the female in the termite community would be emulated also. Thus the mystenous elements of Tashi's drearn move fiom her unconscious mind to become clear in her conscious mind. She is trapped inside a termite Ml which represents the clitoris; she is "heavy, wingless, and inert, the Queen of the dark tower" (Walker, Possessing 239). Pierre tells Tashi: You are the queen who loses her wings. It is you lying in the dark with millions of worker termites . . . You are king Medwith food at one end . . . and having your eggs, millions of them, constantly removed at the other. You who are . . . ody a tube through which generations of visioniess offspring pass . . . You who endure ail this, ody at the end to die, and be devolued by those to whom you've given birth (Walker, Possessing 232-233) Tashi wonders how this archetype of woman as egg-bearer came to exkt in ber unconscious when her conscious mind has never heard of it before. Raye explains the nature of the archetype to her: "We thuik it was told you in code, somehow . . . Not told you directly that you, as a woman, were expected to reproduce as helplessly and inertly as a white ant [termite]; but in a culture in which it is mandatory that every single female be systematically desexed there would have to be some coded mythological reason for it . . ." (Wallcer, Possessing 233). In the novel, the coded mythological reason for the enforced genital mutilation of women is derived from the Dogon creation myth in which Amma (God) created the world fiom a lump of clay. Amma is male and the earth is ferninine, her vulva represented by an anthill and her clitoris by a termite hiIl; Amma "cut down the termite hill" which became erect like a penis (and therefore masculine), and "had intercourse with the excised earth" (WaLker, Possessing 173-1 74). This creation myth also calls for the ritual inscription of sexual roles on the body, as enacted through genitd mutilation of both sexes. Because it was believed that each person had two souk, male and female, the need to ntudly inscribe the sexual role of the person on the physical body set a standard for male and female circumcision; the prepuce of the penis was removed representing the removal of the female element fkom the male, while the clitons was excised to represent the removal of the male element fiom the female. As Tashi notes, "Menthe clitoris rose . . . God thought it looked masculine. Since it was 'masculine' for a clitoris to rise and necessary to remove the masculine element £km the female, God could be excused for cuning it down. Which he did. Then . . . God fucked the hole that was leW (Waker, Possessinq 234-23 5). Tashi reaiizes the deception of the myth and this reaiization of the source of this archetypd myth creates a new problem for her. She is not able to reconcile these new ûxths with the archetypd myth of the termite hiIl that has occupied her unconscîous for her whole life and for the entire history of her culture. However, Tashi's psyche is not concerned with whether its expenence results in an archetype that tnily reflects the physical facts of clitoral excision and other forms of FGM; its ody concem is in expressing the way in which it expenences that which the archetype represents. Unable to repress the archetype as represented by her dream of the termite hill any longer, her psyche is forced to deal with the dream's contents on a conscious level and interpret the drearn in a way that enables her to maintain a balance between al1 the different components of her psychological self. Fominately for Tashi, she has the support and aid of her family and fiiends, as well as Mzee and Raye, some of whorn aid in researching the archetypal myths that appear in her dreams and in giWig her the opportunity to delve into her psychological self to discover the mythological truths which have eluded her and deluded her into undergohg FGM. The degree of Tashi's psychologicd imbalance is evident in Tashi's fantasy and creative life and results in the murder of her circumciser, M'Lissa. Since she was a child she liked to tell nones, but as she matures, she realizes that story-telling and fantasinng ate a means of avoiding and deflecting the truths she has discovered-truths which codict with the archetypal dream of the termite hill. Even as Tashi begins to tell her owstory, çhe inte~ptsit with a story: "1did not reaiize for a long time that 1 was dead. And that reminds me of a story . . ." (Wallcer, Possessing 3). Olivia, Tashi's lifelong friend, concurs that her storytelling is a way of evadhg tebgor dealhg with the truth:

"This is the way Tasbi expressed herseIf. The way she taiked and evaded the issue, even as a child" (Walker, Possessing 6). Olivia and her fdymet Tashi on the day of Dura's death, so there is no evidence as to whether Tashi's evasive storytelling began prior to or at that point. Nonetheless, she is traumatized by Dura's death and blocks the event from her mind, disassociating Dura's bleeding to death from the omet of her own fear of blood. As an adult, Tashi tells Raye about her "lifelong tendency to escape from reality into the reaim of fantasy and storytelling":

Without this habit, I said, it would be impossible for me to guess anythmg out of the ordinary had happened to me. . . . 1 mean, if 1 find myself way off into an improbable tale, imagining it or telling if then 1 cm guess something homble has happened to me and that I can't bear to think about it. . . . the story is only the mask for the truth? (Walker, Possessing 132)

At her own triai, her imagination takes over; for example, the word "testimony"

(refemng to the "custom of two men holding each other's testicles in a gesture of trustt1) leads her to fantasize that the witness and the attorney are involved in a "tomd romance" (Waker, Possessing f 07). Even after Pierre has explained the dream of the tower to her and releases the archetype of the termite hiIl fiom her unconscious, Tashi still fin& herself veering off into a fantasy world. During Pierre's explmation of the rnyth, Tashi fmds she is unable to pay attention and feels that she is "under the influence of a new, mild and quite pleasant drug" (Walker, Possessim 175). She clahs to be listening, but "the words, on touching rny ear, bounce back into his mouth, as if they're made of India rubber"

(Walker, Possessing 175). Then, just as the image of the cock in Mzee's film triggen her remembrance of Dura's death, the phrase "an invisible hand" on the page of Griaule's book jurnps out at her. Tashi recognizes that the myth's clah that the pain of childbirth is concentrated in the clitoris (symbolized as the sting of a dangerous scorpion) and that its excision removes that pain is false; she has no clitoris yet felt a great deai of pain giving birth to Bemy; she cannot accept the myth's assertion that excision is a remedy 105 for pain or that sexual delineation of the body's sexuai organs is necessary to determine the sexual nature of one's sou1 (Wdker, Possessing 177). Mbati, a young Olinkan woman who took care of M'Lissa in her W days and Tashi's adopted daughter, feels angry that she has never heard the true reason why she was genitdly mutilated. This expression of anger causes Tashi to feel "split . . . Ui twon: she is present in body, but her imagination creates a scenario wherein she is a srna11 chiid who overhears a group of male elders' conversation about the importance of FGM as a means of controlling women (Waker, Possessing 238). Tashi's truth is embedded in her active imagination and her stories: both her own truth-her experience of FGM and its consequences- and the tmth of the origin of FGM as it lies buried in the collective unconscious of her culture and subsequently in her own unconscious mind. Jung suggested that in order to analyze one's fantasies, one should contemplate "any one fragment of any fantasy that seems significant . . . until its content becomes visible, that is to Say, the relevant associative material in which it is embedded" (Jung, Portable Jung 68). When she fm arrives at Mzee's and begins psychoanalysis, she sketches the scene of her own birth, her "entrance into reality" when her mother met a leopard on the path as she was about to give birth to Tashi (Wdker, Possessing 54). She paints the leopard with two legs and her "terrified mother with four," perhaps signiQing her unconscious understanding of her mother's position as victim as well as perpetrator of FGM (Waker, Possessing 54). Tashi knows fiom the experience of giving birth to Benny, and perhaps also subconsciously and intuitively, that her birth was not an easy one and that her mother's "official story" of ber birth is a lie; however, Tashi's coping mechanism of story-telling and fantasiPng allows her to defer dealing with reality. Mead, she imagines thai she is the female leopard that leapt at her mother, who was pregnant with herself at the tirne.

Tashi identifies (anthropomorphically) with the Ieopard's horror and rage at the murder of the leopard's family, subconsciously allowing heaelf to feel her own horror and rage at the physical and psychological consequences of FGM for her (Walker, Possessing 20). The trigger for her repressed mernories of Dura's death is Mzee's anthropological film of the initiation rites of a group of young girls. The actual ritual of FGM is not apparent in the fh,but the "large fighting cock . . . crowing mightily" "completely tenorize[s]" Tashi and she faints (Walker, Possessing 73). Upon awakening, Tashi becomes obsessed with painting "a rather extended series of ever larger and more fearsome fighting cocks" (Walker, Possessing 73). Graduaily, through this creative endeavor, the remaining hgrnents of what Tashi has repressed since childhood become clear. She realizes that the foot in the painting is M'Lissa's, the cock is actually a chicken, and the chicken is impatiently waiting to be fed Dura's clitoris fier M'Lissa excises it. Dura's clitoris "was so insignificant and unclean that WLissa] carried it not in her fingers but between her toes" (Walker, Possessing 75). The mental strain of this realization, as she consciously heads down the "'crazy road"' signified by the name of the pattern in M'Lissa's wrap, causes Tashi to take on the "classic pose of the deeply insane":

There are no words to descnbe how sick 1 felt as 1 painted. How nauseous; as the cock continued to grow in size, and the bare foot with its little insignificant morsel approached steadily toward what 1 felt wodd be the crisis, the unbearable moment, for me. For, as 1 painted, perspiring, shivering, and moaning faintly, 1 felt that every system in my body, every connecting circuit in my brain, was making an effort to shut down. It was as if the greater half of my being were trying to murder the lesser half . . . " (Waiker, Possessing 74). Adam, in his attempts to justi@ Tashi's murder of M'Lissa to the courtmom, recognizes that her insane behaviour is reactive to the situation she is faced with as a victim of FGM. He asserts that Tashi is a "tortwed woman" whose "whole life was destroyed by the enacbnent of a ritual upon [her] body which [she] had not been equipped to understand" (Walker, Possessing 162). Yet he rnarvels at the fkedom she fin& Ui her insanity as he speaks on her behalE

My wife is hurt, 1 Say. Wounded Broken Not mad. Evelyn laughs. Flinging her head back in deliberate challenge. The laugh is short. Sharp. The bark of a dog. Beyond huri. Unquestionably mad. Oddly free. (Waker, Possessing 167)

As temmng as the process of bringing to consciousness what has so long been repressed, Tashi is Wlyable to look "fidly into the wicked gaze of my creature;" she is no longer fnghtened and, more importantly, her feelings of detyabout the fearsome chicken wane when she understands that the chicken's "ovenveening" and "egotistical" demeanor are the result of a "diet of subrnission" (Waker, Possessing 80). She finds that she is no longer afraid of the sight of blood as she has been since Dura's death. Having remembered Dura's death, she feels "[i]rnmeasurably" better, and is fdlyable to express the truth of it to Mzee and Adam, a verbalization which dislodges the boulder she feels blocking her throat:

1 knew what the boulder was; that it was a word; and that behuld that word 1 wouid find my earliest ernotions. Emotions that had fnghtened me insane. 1 had been going to say, before the boulder barred my throat: my sister's death; because that was how 1 had always thought of Dura's demise. She'd sirnply died. She'd bled and bled and bled and then there was death. No one was responsible. No one to blarne. Instead, 1 took a deep breath and exhaled it against the boulder blocking rny throat: 1 remembered my sister Dura's murder, 1 said, exploding the boulder. (Walker, Possessing 83) Tashi's unconscious refûsai to hear Dura "screaming in [her] ears since it happened" is echoed at Benny's birth (Walker, Possessing 83). Tashi feels "as if there was a loud noise of something shattering on the floor, there between me and Adam and our baby and the doctor. But there was only a ringing silence. Which seemed oddly, after a moment, iike the screaming of monkeys" (Walker, Possessing 59). This screaming is essentiaily a prima1 scream, resonating from the collective unconscious where the mythological termite-hill-as-clitoris archetype fin& its origin. The idea of the prima1 scream as connected to the collective unconscious is later

reinforced by Tashi's fellow prisoner and AIDS victim, Hartford. Adam Mens tu his last confession as he lies dying:

"The screaming of monkeys . . . is really unlike the scream of [a] human. But somehow, because of the chùnps' and monkeys' faces, their screarning is even more huma.. EveIything they think, everything they fear, everything they feel, is as clear as if you'd known them ail your life. As if they'd slept in the same bed as you! (Walker, Possessing 264) Hartford's hunting to obtain monkey kidneys for a phamiaceutical company's vaccine business and the Olinkan FGM ritual reveal the same problem. "Naving been indoctrinated fiom birth to believe" in the correctness of exploitation of the earth's resources or exploitation of women's bodies, how could anyone "anticipate0 the evil of civilization"? (Walker, Possessing 265). Having evolved fiom primates, the screaming of monkeys represents, essentially, the archetypal screaming ~f humanity as the pain and suffering that is the inevitable result of humanity's abuses of nature and of each other are buried and repressed. A second boulder is dislodged fiom Tashi's throat in therapy with Raye, the psychologist recommended by Mzee to replace hi.after his death. Mzee, as a white European who has an anthropological interest in Olinkan culture as a primitive society, is ill-equipped to fully comprehend the tnie nature of the effects of FGM on Tashi's body and her rnind. Tashi fin& it difficult to know where to begin in explaining her life to him when he does not even recognize that she is Afncan, not Negro: "One was left speechless by al1 such a pemn couldn't know" (Waker, Possessing 19). Raye, on the other han& is "pluce enough to accompany [Tashi] where he could not" (Walker, Possessing 134). Although Tashi resents the "spring in [Raye's] step" that is the result of behg unmutilated, she feels connected to Raye because of their shared African ancesq (Wallter, Possessing 116). In Raye, Tashi sees an Afkican American woman able to practise "an ageless magic, the foundation of which was the ritualization, or the acting out, of empathy. . . . [She is] a spiritual descendant of the ancient healers who tau& our witch doctors and were famous for their compassionate skill" (Waker, Possessing, 134). Tashi attempts to explain the events that led to her undergoing FGM as an adult and hds "a boulder, twin to the one that suppressed the tmth of Dura's murder, begin closing my throat" (Walker, Possessing 116). The boulder is the lie that says her Iife is "insignificant" in cornparison to that of Our Leader, the Olinkan political leader who was exiled, then arrested and impnsoned by the white regime, and fmaiIy martyred for his people; he was revered as a go& and then as a Christ figure after his death. Revered as a god by his people, the Olinkan people did not question his "[s]ensible" and "correct" instructions on how they should live: "That we must remember who we were. That we must fight the white oppressors without ceasing. . . . that we must retum to the purity of our own culture and traditions. That we must not neglect our ancient customs" (Waker, Possessing 117). Tashi does not question Our Leader's instructions at the time, but voices her concenis later to Raye: "But what if he'd told you to do somethhg that destroyed you? Something that was wrong?" (Walker, Possessing 117). She answers her own question and so eradicates the second boulder in her boat by revealing to Raye

(and to herself) the tme nature of FGM, the mythologicd reasons for FGM, her fears that she could not be accepted as a woman without it, and the truth of what FGM bas cos her. With the verbalization of this knowledge, "[tlhe boulder now not only had rolled off my tongue but was rolling quite rapidly away fiom me toward the door" (Walker, Possessing 123). HaWig conquered one fear, that of rernembering the tme nature of Dura's death- that she was murdered and someone is responsible for her sister's murder-Tashi is able to examine other repressed feelings and fears, in particuiar, her feelings towards M'Lissa and the effects FGM had on her. The foot holding the clitoris in Tashi's painting is " Cllame, subservient, mindless," but the owner of the foot, M'Lissa, is not and Tashi has to cod'kont her feelings of kedfor and rage at M'Lissa (Walker, Possessing 80). Anger and hatred become a powemil tool in this scenario and they help Tashi deal with some of the psychologicai effects of FGM. The nature of the clitoris itself is important if one is to understand fully the ramifications of FGM on the body and on the psyche. In Efua Dorkenoo and S. Elworthy's Female Genital Mutilation: Proposais for Change, Dr. T. A. Ba'asher asserts that "'the mere notion of surgical interference in the highly sensitive genital organs constitutes a serious threat to the child and that the painful operation is a source of major phy sical as well as psychological trauma"' (1 0). Physically, the removal of clitoral "[tlissue rich in nerve endings" leaves the number of "nerve endings of the remaining genitalia . . . drastically reduced," resulting in a reduced capacity to enjoy sexual relationships (Sanderson, Against the Mutilation 104; Bettelheim, Symbolic Wounds

252). In ternis of sexual function, the excision of the clitoris is analogous to the removal of the penis, thereby attenuating, if not obliterating altogether, a woman's sexual desire. Women's "sex organs, though interna1 and not as easily visible as men's, expand during arousal to approxirnateiy the same volume as an erect penis" (Hite, The Hite Report 96). Further, Hite notes that female orgasm is caused by clitoral stimulation, just as male orgasm is caused by "stimulation of the top of the male penis"; both male and female orgasms occur deeper within the lower body in the surrounding genitaI structures [ne Hite Report 99). However, unlike the penis, "which is also employed in reproduction and excretion, the clitoris has no reason beyond pleanue for being" (Bennett," Critical Clitondectorny" 238). Male insistence on the nipenority of the pend phallus and the corresponding inferiority and insignificmce of the clitoris reveals a "profound fear of independent female sexual potency" (Bennett, "Critical Clitoridectomy" 250). Dorkenoo and Elworthy assert that, although "excision of the ditons reduces sensitivity," sexual desire itself is a "psychological amibute" and therefore, the psychological ramifications are indeterminable:

We do not know what it means to a girl or woman when her central organ of sensory pleasure is cut off, when her life-giving canai is stitched up amid blood and fear and secrecy, while she is forcibly held down, and told that if she screams she will cause the death of her mother, or bring shame on her fdly. (Fernale Genital Mutilation 13, 10) Convenely, however, the societal and peer pressures to submit to an ancient ritual that tells the child that her vdva is unclean and a threat to the mores of the culture if it is not removed are so great that the young girl "will feel relieved psychologically to be made Iike everyone else" (Dorkenoo and Elworthy, Female Genital Mutilation 10). This pressure is so great that even Tashi, a grown woman with a supportive husband who did not require FGM to marry her, feels pressure to conform to Olinkan tradition.

In The Circumcision of Wornen: A Strategy for Eradication, Koso-Thomas lists some of the psycho-sexual problems that can occur as a result of FGM:

"lack of orgasm" from "amputation of the giam choris," "fngidity" resulting fiom fear of the pain of intercourse and fear of defibulation to enlarge the opening, "anxiety" resulting "inbuilt sense of inadequacy to effectively respond to, and satisfy their husband's emotional needs," "depression . . . owing to recurrhg episodes of frigidity and anxiety. These . . . may lead to mild or moderate psychosis, especially when jealousy of a potential rival for their husband's affection arises." (27-28) The latter resul: of psychosis arising out of "jealousy of a potential rival for thek husband's affection" is certainly true in Tashi's case. Tashi's genital mutilation causes marital stresses that eventually lead her to separate nom Adam for a time and lead Adam to seek fiendship and sexual satisfaction elsewhere. He fin& both in a relationship with Lisette, a Caucasian French colonialist exiled nom Algena; they meet in Olinka and 112 continue their fi-iendship in France. Distressed by his relationship with Tashi, Adam feels the need to ask Lisette, a single, modem career woman, about her sex life in order to compare and attempt to normalize his difficdt sexual relationship with Tashi (Walker, Possessing 3 1j. Eventually, his questions are answered as the fkiends become lovers and Lisette becomes pregnant with their son Pierre.

Lisette's pregnancy is a tunillig point in Tashi's mentai health. Lisette notes, "When Evelyn [Tashi] learned of my pregnancy with little Pierre . . . she flew into a rage that subsided into a years-long deterioration and rancorous depression. She tried to kill herselt She spoke of murdering their son" (Walker, Possessing 127). Tashi envies the way that Lisette appears "contented and self-possessed: autonomous in a way 1 could not imagine for myself' (Walker, Possessing 143). Tashi, in contrast, is full of rage: "1 felt the violence rising in me with every encounter with the world outside my home. Even inside it 1 fiequently and with little cause, no cause, boxed Benny's ears. If 1 made hun squeal and cringe and look at me with eyes gone grave with love and incomprehension, I fancied I felt relief' (Walker, Possessing 144).

When Adam and Lisette's son, Pierre, cornes to stay with them after Lisette's death, Tashi is a "dark spectre," the physical manifestation of the repressed shadow portion of her psyche, who throws stones at Pierre (Walker, Possessing 145). Tashi has collected these stones since she first learned that Lisette had given birth to her husbanbs son, signifjring the fact that she, as a woman, has no socially acceptable outiet for her anger and, as a resdt, her anger has been growing inside of her for many years until it fmdly explodes in a hail of stones. Fanny's comments to Suwelo in Waikefs The Temple of My Familiar are particularly apropos here as Tashi's inability to express her anger is socially constmcted: "'You're large,' she said. 'You're a man. If you feel violent toward someone, you can do something about it You cm be more direct. And you give yourself permission to feel it Women are given no such permission'" (Walker, Temple 302). Women can not even permit themselves to feel this anger because they are subject to male social prescriptions which dictate the appropriate ways in whîch a woman shouid behave. What is the outcome of repressed anger? According to Carlotta in The Temple of My Familiar, one outcome is that "'[rlepressed anger leads straight to depression. Depression leads straight to suicide"' (388). Tashi attempts suicide and abuses her body; she does not eat and she cuts herself "on purpose" (Walker, Possessing 144, 82). Adam writes of her self-abusive behaviour:

At first she rnerely spoke about the strange compulsion she sometimes experienced of wanting to mufilate herse& Then one morning I woke to find the foot of our bed red with blood Completely unawure of whot she wer doing, she said. and fieling nothing, she had sliced rings. bbloody bracelets, or chuins, around her ankles. (Walker, Possessing 5 1) The bloody chains she has sliced into her own flesh are reminiscent of the chains wom by African slaves; these wounds are an interesting metaphor that attest to the fact that Tashi is an unwitthg slave to the rituals imposed upon her by her culture and a slave to her mutilated body. Tashi, physically and psychologically circumcised, is on a "continuum of pain"; the act of undergoing genital mutilation is not the "singular, absolute" act Adam has always thought (Wallcer, Possessing 169). There are multiple consequences of FGM just as there are multiple expressions of repressed anger; the other more significant expression is madness or insanity and Tashi's ultimate outlet for her anger is her seemingly insane murder of M'Lissa As evident in history and as revealed through Tashi's archetypal dream, FGM is a

ritual invented by men in order to control female sexuality. As Lisette tells her son,

FGM signifies the "connection between mutilation and enslavement that is at the root of the domination of women in the world" (Walker, Possessing 139). Although bell hooks is refenhg to The CoIor Purple, her commentary on the nature of mothedy bemyal applies to Possessing the Secret of Joy as well: "Since the mother is bonded with the father, supporting and protecting his interests, mothers and daughters within this fictive patriarchy suffer a wound of separation and abandonment; they have no context for dty. Mothers prove their allegiance to fathers by betraying daughters" ("Wriring the Subject" 226). Out of fear for their own economic and social sumival and for that of their daughters, women inflict FGM on their daughters. In order to do this, a mother ha to ignore and repress the child in herseIf that remernbers when FGM was done to her; she cannot question the reasons behind it because even to speak of it is taboo. Silence is the order of the day in the perpetuation of the tradition of FGM. Tashi tells the story of how when Dura was an infant, she was scarred as a result of putting a burning twig between her lips. Physically able to remove the source of her pain, she did not; insîead, she cried "piteously, her arms outstretched. Zooking about for help. No, rhey laughed. telling this story, not simply for help, for deliverance" (Walker, Possessing 10). Dura's cries for help apparently went unheeded as she was scarred as a result of this trauma. This story acts as a metaphor for the ritual of FGM as it is enacted on female children. Just as Dura does not know any better than to put the buming twig in her mouth, young girls are not idormed of the ramifications of FGM; essentially, they never know what they are missing because no one has told them what it is that they have lost. The scar lefi by the buming twig parallels the scar left by FGM; the mouth represents the vulva and the excision and mutilation of the vulva results in silence. To speak of what is done is taboo. To the Olinkans, a female clitoris is worthless flesh-chicken feed-and not worth speaking of. Luce Irigaray brings an interestkg perspective to the male perception of and (de)valuing of female genitalia She writes, ""Women's genitals are simply absent, masked, sewn back up inside their 'crack"' (Irigaray, This Sex 26). Female genitals, with their many erogenous areas, allow for an uniquely multiple and plural fernale sexuality; there is no need to choose, as Freud insisted, "between clitorai aaivity and vagind passivity" in a woman's sexual development (Irigaray, This Sex 28).

Unfortunately for the woman, phallomorphism is privileged at the expense of the pleasure provided by female autoeroticism; as Pierre notes, "Man is jealous of woman's pleasure . . . because she does not require him to achieve it" (Walker, Possessing 182). Male jealousy of a woman's muitiplicitous sexuality results in its disruption "by a violent break-in: the brutal separaiion of two hips by a violating penis, an intrusion that distracts and deflects the woman £iom this 'self-caressing' she needs if she is not to incur the disappearance of her own pleasure in sexual relations" (Irigaray, This Sex 24). In this scenario, only the penis holds value. It is "[tlhe one of form, of the individual, of the

(male) sexual organ, of the proper name, of the proper meaning . . . [which] supplants, while separating and dividing, that contact of ot Ieast two (lips) which keeps woman in touch with herself' (Irigaray, This Sex 26). Unlike the male penis, woman's sexual multiplicity makes her "neither one nor two . . . She resists al1 adequate definition. Further, she has no 'proper' name. And her sexud organ, which is not one organ, is counted as none. The negative, the underside, the reverse of the only visible and morphologicaily designatable organ . . . the penis" (Irigaray, This Sex 26). The male insistence on the primacy of male sexuality, that is, sexuality that has the penis as its locus, negates the multiplicitous nature of female sexuality and makes a woman fiagmentary, not whole. In Olinkan culture, a woman's multiple sedity is negated altogether with the violent and traumatic excision of the extemal sexual organs and the subsequent sewing together of the remaining skin to fom a smooth surface. Having undergone FGM, Tashi tdy represents Irigaray's "sex which is not one;" without those pleasure-producing organs which make a woman a muitiply sexual being, she is relegated to the male- prescribed roles of wife and mother. The forced entq of the penis into the now sequestered vagina reinforces the male's dominance over woman's sexuality. She

"renounces the pleasure that she gets fiom the non-suture of her lips: she is undoubtedly a mother, but a Wgin mother, the role was assigneci to her by mythologies long ago. Granting her a certain social power to the extent that she is reduced, with her own complexity, to sexual impotence" (Irigaray, This Sex 30). Tashi's pseudo-immacdate conception of Be~ydespite the lack of sexud penetration by Adam (showing that he is sensitive to her pain), supports the notion thaf indeed, she has become the virgin mother as a resdt of her renouncing sexual pleasure in order to fit Olinkan cultural expectations. Tashi is not aware of any of this, however; her naiveté about her own body, her sexuality, and the rituai she decides to undergo is the result of the tradition of silence that prevents discussion of female sexuality and FGM. When Tashi is on trial for her life derkilling M'Lissa, Adam comments on the taboo against speaking: "They do not want to hear what their children sufSer. TTheytve made the telling of the suffenng itself taboo. Like visible signs of menstruation. Signs of woman's mental power. Signs of the weakness and uncertainty of men" (Waiker, Possessing 165). The primary question for

Adam (and of the novel) is, "tYhy is the child ctyhg?" (Walker, Possessing 165). When

Adam and Olivia fm meet Tashi she is cxying out of grief for Dura, who died that morning at the han& of the tsunga. Yet she is told, "You mustn't cry," and asserts: "It was a nightmare. Suddedy it was not acceptable to speak of my sister. Or to cry for her'' (Walker, Possessing 15). Their mother, Nafa, "fills the emptiness" Ieft by Dura's death with work; she never cries (Walker, Possessing 16). Tashi's discovery of M'Lissa's rise to a position of renom and respect as an Olinkan patriot for "her unfailhg adherence to the ancient customs and traditions" leads her to seek M'Lissa out and murder her out of revenge and as the final expression of her repressed anger (Waker, Possessing 149). M'Lissa's eyes reveal a similar flat gaze to her

117 own, as if the core of her being had been cut away, which, of course, it has: "Her whole body is smiling her welcome; except for her eyes. They are wary and alen . . . What is that shadow, there in the depths? 1s it apprehension? 1s it fear?" (Wdcer, Possessing 155). Even Walker's interview with an acan circumciser reveals this change in the eyes' appearance: "Mas>of us notice that a person habeen circumcised because the light in the eyes goes out. 7here is un absence of light in the eyes" (Waiker, Warrior Marks, 307).

Tashi wonders, incredulously, "How had 1 eneusted my body to this madwoman?" (Walser, Possessing 151). M'Lissa's stories-like Tashi's, they are means of avoiding the truth-prolong M'Lissa's life for a tirne. Interestuigly, M'Lissa's stories enable Tashi to see the truth of her identity as both Olinkan and American: "An American . . . look like a wounded person whose wound is hidden fiom others, and sometimes fiom herself An American looks like me" (Walker, Possessing 2 13). Tashi recognizes her own wound and through her conversations with M'Lissa enables M'Lissa to corne to tems with hers; together they begin a process of psychic healing and Tashi finds that her anger towards M'Lissa dissipates. M'Lissa's mother, a tsunga, gave her the gift of a statue showing a female figure touching her clitoris and attempted to allow M'Lissa to keep part of her clitoris; her "mother's disobedience" resdted in a particularly brutal genital mutilation by a witchdoctor and a limping gait (Walker, Possessing 2 17). As part of her psychological healing process, Tashi examines and rejects the archetypal myth of the termite hill. In its place, she embraces the archetype of the "Creator, Goddess, the Life Force itself' as symbolùed in a linle masturbatory statue similar to the one M'Lissa's mother gave her (Walker, Possessing

200). The statue is fernale, "smiling broadly, eyes closed, and touching her genitals" claiming physical self-possession over her body and over her sedty. Phyllis Chesler asserts that although "[p]hallus-worship is well represented in myth, painting, sculpture, and modem bedroom practices" and "clitoris-worship ancilor non-productive vagina

wonhip is not" (Women and Madness 46). Olivia argues that prior to the subjugation of women, female sexuality was embraced and celebrated; as evidence she describes several examples of ancient paintings and pottery that reveal happy, physically intact women. Prior to her death, reclaiming the statue's original purpose as a teaching tool for young girls, Tashi bequeaths the statue and the gift of knowledge of female sexual self- possession and whoIeness to the fuhue daughter of Mbati, a woman whom Tashi has claimed as the daughter she might have given birth to if she had not aborted the baby because of FGM. In speaking of what she underwent as a child, M'Lissa's own healing begins as she becomes aware of the child in her who was killed at the the she went under the kni fe :

I could never again see myself, for the child that hdly rose from the mat three months later, and dragged herself out of the initiation hut and finally home, was not the child who had been taken there. 1 was never to see that child again. . . . 1 finally see her . . . The child who went into the initiation hut . . . I left her there bleeding on the floor, and I came out. She was crying. She felt so betrayed. By everyone. . . . I couldn't think about her anymore. 1 would have died. So 1 walked away, limped away, and just Iefi her there. . . . She is still crying. She's been crying since 1 lefi. No wonder 1 haven't been able to. She has been crying al1 our tears. (Walker, Possessing 222,225)

M'Lissa allows herself to grieve for her forgotten child-self and this act of cryhg heals her just as remembering Dura's murder has a heding effect on Tashi: "1 felt a painful stitch throughout my body that I knew stitched my tears to my soul. No longer wodd my weeping be separate fkom what 1 bzew" (Walker, Possessing 83). Through the figurative process of re-membering, of putting herseIfIfthe wounded

child and the scarred adult-back together, M'Lissa realizes her role as patriot and protector of Olinkan culture has been nothing more than a mask for her role as a "tortureru of children" (Waiker, Possessing 226). For Tashi, hearing about M'Lissa's pain-so similar to her own-creates a bond between them and dissipates Tashi's anger towards her. Her ultimate murder of M'Lissa by suffocation is not an act of revenge, but rather an act of completion as Olinkan tradition dictates that someone circumcised by the tsunga be her murderer (Walker, Possessiq 276). Tashi's belief in this tradition is the reason she is able to tell Olivia that she was not the root cause of M'Lissa's death; MZissa "die[d] under her own powerf'-the power she gained by perpetuating FGM on other women (Walker, Possessing 255). Tashi's comment that "women are cowards" is corroborated in the courtroom where those taking part in and observing her îrial perpetuate the tradition of silence. They do not hear in Tashi's voice or recognize in themselves the crying child Adam's father is concemed about when fim they arrive in Olinka. Adam sees each of the courtroom occupants "as the little child my father was always so concerned about, screarning her terror etemally into her own ear" (Walker, Possessing 166). Sadly and to no avail, Tashi screams her terror into the ears of the judges and the courtroom occupants, an act which has the potential but fails to trigger their own painful childhood memones of FGM: "Can you bear to know what 1 have lost?" (Walker, Possessing 35). She wonders at their deahess: "How could 1 beiieve these were the same women I'd known al1 my life?" (WaIker, Possessing 15). Her position as victim is tenuous, however, because, at least in the world's (and the courtroomfs)eyes, she made a conscious and adult, however misinformed, decision to undergo FGM. Additionally, her murder of a cultural icon, M'Lissa, and the tradition of silence that surrounds the underlying reasons for the murder prevent conscious understanding of her position. Even Mzee, perhaps not understanding the cultural pressures placed on her to undergo FGM,feels Tashi needs to take responsibility for her conscious choice as an adult to have her genitals mutilated: "Yom is the pain of the careless carpenter who, with his hammer, bashes his own thumb" (Walker, Possessing

49). However, as much as Tashi may be the careless carpenter, it is her community, her culture, that is holding the hanmer; it insists on FGM as the pnce of acceptance for women within the culture. Betrayed by the women in her community and convicted by a patriarchal justice system, her screaming is to no avail and Tashi is convicted to death by firing squad. As a result of her conviction, however, Tashi and her case gain notoriety and attention fiom foreign media and women's groups. She becomes a martyr for her (and Walker's) cause and a source of strength for women who would like to protect their daughters fiom FGM but have never been afTorded the opportunity to object to it. As a martyr, she has no regrets. She takes full responsibility for her actions and for her decision to undergo FGM as an ad&; she comments to Olivia that although she has paid and will pay with her life for her decision, she still stands by her need to assert herself as Olinkan, as other than the outsider position Olivia represents: "Because when 1 disobey you, the outsider, even if it is wrong, 1 am being what is left of myself. And that sliver of myself is al1 1 now have lefi" (Walker, Possessing 254). As an Olinkan woman, subjugated to colonialist influences as well as patriarchal physical mutilation, she is unable to identify with a white colonialist authots comment that "'Black people are natura3 . . . they possess the secret of joy, which is why they can survive the dering and humiliation uiflicted upon them"' (Walker, Possessing 271). She charges Mbati with fmding out what that secret is before she is put to death.

Clearly, the psychic and physicd wounding Tashi receives as a result of FGM has not brought out some sort of inner strength or joy inherent to Afkicans; her wounding resulted in madness, murder, and her eventual physical death. However, Walker's revisionhg of mothering subverts the patriarchd process and allows Mbati to find the

121 answer to Tashi's query about the secret of joy. Although Mzee does not possess a fidl understanding of the nature of FGM,he does understand the nature of motherly betrayal: "Negro women, the doctor says into my silence, can never be analyzed effectively because they cm never b~gthemselves to blame their mothers" (Walker, Possessing 19). This staternent is Walker's startùig point in her argument for a cornmunity of women and the eradication of FGM and other similar patriarchai oppressions. Mzee's suggestion that Tashi's psychoanalysis would be more nuxessfuI if she could blame her mother is a "new thought" which "sets off a kind of explosion" in Tashi's muid" (Walker, Possessing 19). Not yet able to deal on a conscious level with the consequences of this explosion, her mind veers off into fan- yet again. She imagines the angry leopard that leapt at her mother; yet underlying this revision of her mother's tale of her birth is repressed anger at her mother for perpetuating FGM on her sister and for its cultural acceptance altogether. Effectively, Walker uses Tashi to argue that madness and torture are socially constructed and result in equally insane reactions to these constructions; as Fanny suggests in Temple of My Familiar, people are al1

11 insane;" the "world in which we live" has "tortured" everyone "into a perfect state of madness" (Walker, Temple 388). Madness is the inevitable result of silence, the means by which FGM is perpetuated. The expression of anger is the rneans by which the silence is broken and

women's voices are heard. As Marianne Hïrsch notes, "To be angry is to claim a place, to assert a right to expression and to discourse, a right to intelligibility . . . silence tends to make us uncornfortable because we tend to suspect it conceals anger" ("Ciytemnestra7s Children" 195). Walker suggests that women's righteous anger at the way in which they have been subordinated and abused by men is the means by which women are able to resist and eradicate FGM and other sirnilar customs. In the Temple of My Familiar, Fanny wonders about "the bottled-up, repressed anger of the acanwoman, silent for so long. She thought of this anger as an enormous storehouse of energy and wondered whether the women knew they owned it. Anger can also be a kind of wdth, she thought" (Walker, Temple 267). Madness is the resdt of Tashi's repressed anger, but she is able to reclaim her sanity as a result of her bonding with the community of women, including M'Lissa By redefeg what it means to be a mother, Waiker inverts the patriarchal process whereby women beîray their daughters in order to survive withui the culture.

Just as Walker redefines virginity for Celie making it possible for Celie to see herself and her sexuality as separate fiom and outside of patriarchal culture, Waker's refiguration of motherhood as woman-bonding where biological motherhood does not defme a wornan's ability to mother or numire other women subverts the patriarchal control imposed by FGM.In a patriarchal culture that permits and, in fact, insists on the subjugation of women's bodies to FGM, the refiguration of what it means to be a rnother-that is, a non-biological function-is the key to relieving the oppression and helplessness of women. This refiguration allows women to hdsolidarity in a non- biological but united fernale community. Speaking of The Color Purple, hooks notes,

p]t is oniy a vision of sisterhood that makes woman bonding possible. . . . outside the context of patriarchal family nom . . . mothering . . . becomes a task any willing female can perform, irrespective of whether or not she has given birth. Displacing motherhood as central signifier for female being, and emphasizing sisterhood, Walker posits a relational basis for selfdefinition that valorizes and afkns woman bonding. It is the recognition of self in the other, of unity, and not self in relationship to the production of children that enables women to connect with one another. The values expressed in woman bonding-mutuality, respect, shared power, and unconditional love-become guiding principies shaping the new community . . . which includes everyone, women and men, family and kin. ("Writing the Subject" 226) In this figuration, because they are bonded by non-biological motherhood, women are strengthened and able to resist patriarchal oppression. Walker's womanist vision of a 123 strong femaie community is seen in several instances of non-biologicai mothers mothering other women's biological children in both The Color Purpie and Possessing the Secret of Joy: Corrine and Nettie mother Olivia's biological children, Adam and Olivia; Celie mothers Alphonse's children; Tashi mothers Mbati. On the day Tashi faces the firing squad, Mbati, Tashi's family, and Raye unroll a banner that reads, "RESISTANCE IS THE SECRET OF JOY!" (Waker, Possessing 281). Strengthened by her sacrifice and the broken taboo of silence which came as a resdt of the court case, women sing to support their mutual cause outside the jail and expose the intact genitais of their baby girls at her execution to reveal that her sacrifice has not been an exercise in futility and that there is hope for the next generation. This brings both the novel and Walker's political agenda to eradicate FGM full circle and signifies Tashi's complete psychological healing. At the moment of her death, she is no longer an outsider and her psychic split is heded: "There is a roar as if the world cracked open and 1 flew inside. 1 am no more. And satisfied" (Walker, Possessing 28 1). Tashi's psychological healing and her connection at the moment of her death with the universe reveal Waker's uniQing vision for the fiiture and what she perceives as her role as the artist. The protagonist of her novel Meridian offers a glimpse of Walker's holistic and uni3ing vision of the universe as well as what she perceives as the role of the artist:

[Plerhaps it will be my part to wak behind the real revolutionaries- those who know they must spi11 blood in order to help the poor and the black and therefore go nght ahead and when they stop to wash off the blood and find their throats too choked with the smell of murdered flesh to sing, 1 will come forward and sing fiom memory songs they will need once more to heal. For it is the Song of the people, transformed by the experiences of each generation, that holds them together, and if any part of it is lost the people sufFer and are without soul. If 1 can ody do that, my role wiIl not have been a useless one &er all. (Walker, 1976,201) Walker's sense of responsibility as a writer has led her to wrïte about women's oppression, their escape and heaiing hm it, and women's attainment of sexual and psychological control over their lives and their bodies. It can be argued that FGM is a tradition that belongs to a culture other than our own and, quite nanirally, the question is raised: Who am 1 to question or judge the longstanding customs of another culture? The terrn "custom" means "'something we inherited from an untraceable past which has no rational meaning and lies within the realm of untouchable sensitivity of traditionai people"' (Gruenbaum, "Movement Against Clitondectorny" 5). From an anthropological point of view, a culture's customs and rituals do serve a purpose in the sense that they "fom a fÎamework of interrelated idioms, a logic of daily life through which reality is ordered and experience mediated" (Gordon, "Female Cucurncision" 13). It should be considered here that there are many Western customs which can be seen as unnecessary also, such as plastic surgery, makeup, and restrictive clothing. However, it is Waiker's hope thaf through her writing and the efforts of other individuals and groups who like to see the eradication of FGM, humanity will gain a greater understanding of the ramifications of FGM and will examine the myths and archetypes that support this "untouchable" custom. Perhaps through education, awareness, and the continued breaking of the taboo of silence, humanity will corne to realize that, as Melvin Konner asserts,

Cultural relativism notwithstanding, . . . [tlhese procedures are mutilations. And since they are done to children, they are also child abuse. . . . Yet millions of little girls are being deprived of the only human organ whose sole bction is pleasure, and in the process are being subjected to pain, infection and death. ("Name of Tradition" 6) Walker argues through her characters that Westerners are collaborators in the perpetuation of FGM. Lisette explains that because the paûiarchal domination of women is not physically written on the body in the same mutilating way as it is in African culm, Westerners become the "perfect audience": "mesmerized by our unconscious lmowledge of what men, with the collaboration of our mothers, do to us" (Walker, Possessing 13 9). A fine line is drawn between collaboration with the perpetrators of FGM through Westem silence and acceptance of FGM as a cultural tradition and the perception that Westem efforts to educate and eradicate FGM are coloniaiist in nature. As Dorkenoo and Elworthy cob,"Westem efforts to eiiminate the practice, on the part of missionaries or colonial administrators, have simply senred to confiin people's mincis that colonial destruction of traditional customs weakens their societies and exposes them to the ill- effects of Westem influence" (Female Genital Mutilation 15). In addition, simple legislation and govemment efforts to ban FGM do not take into account the social implications for women who do not undergo FGM. Gruenbaum suggests that to obtain effective political change, there needs to be a

women's movement oriented toward the basic social problems affecthg women, particularly their economic dependency, educational disadvantages, and obstacles to employment . . . . To improve women's social and economic sec*, marital customs must be challenged, and new civil laws are needed to offer additionai protection to mamied and divorced women conceming child custody, rights in marital property, and financial support . . .("Movement Against Clitoridectomy" 8) Ideally, this women's movement should come from witbthe culture affected by FGM due to the perception that outside influences are colonialist in nature. Clearly, as Jung suggests, "Culture lies outside the purpose of nature" (Jung, Portable Jung 18). Ultimately, Walker argues, one must look past the facts that exist-the fact that the tradition itself exists and the fact that it has existed so long that many people, including those who perpetuate if no longer remember its origins and accept it without question-and ask the simple question that Walker asks of herself in writing her novels: are we saving the life that is our own? Walker's political agenda for the novel is simple and obvious; she want.. to see the eradication of FGM. She believes, as Olivia expresses in The Temple of My Familiar, that "the child will always, as an adult, do to

someone else whatever was done to him when he was a child. It is how we, aç human

behgs, are made" (3 10). Change can only corne about through conscious examination of the archetypes and myths which support the oppression of women in the collective unconscious; Jungian psychoanalysis is the vehicle by which Tashi is psychologicdIy healed and able to achieve selfhood,

Walker's perspective on life is circdar. As Pierre explains to Bemy that Tashi's death is part of a cycle: "NOTHING = NOT BEING = DEATH. . . . BUT EVERYTHING THAT DIES COMES AROUND AGAM" (Walker, Possessing 197).

Resistance is the secret of joy because it is the vehicle by which change cm occur. In her writing and in her life, one of Walker's main preoccupations and interests has been the connection between violence, female sexuality, and patriarchd efforts to subordinate and control women. The themes of patriarchai oppression of women, escape from and healing of these abuses, and the achievement of selfhood are exemplified in Zora Neaie Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God As Washington explains, "female sexuality is always associated with violence. Janie's mother and grandmother are sexually exploited and Janie is beaten by her glorious lover, Tea Cake, so that he can prove his superiority to other men. . . . [This]point[s] to the fundamental issue of whether or not women can exert control over their sexuality" ("Darkened Eye" xxiii). Modeling her work on Hunton's, Wallcer continues to examine and develop these themes with the goal of universal healing and escape fiom oppression in rnind, as seen in The Color Purple and Possessing the Secret of Joy, as well as her other writing.

Walker identifies herself as an artkt within the Afncan Arnerican literary tradition and, as such, asserts that it is the dst's responsibility to speak for those oppressed women, AfÎican and Afiïcan American women especially, who cannot speak for thernselves. As she says, "'1 was brought up to try to see what was wrong and right it. Since 1 am a writer, writing is how 1 right it'" (Bradley, "NovelistAlice Walker" 36). Notes

1 Andrews argues that the sole diversion hmthe theme of empowerment came &om Booker T. Washington, author of Up From Slavery (1901), in the fomi of "Tuskegee realism." Rather than focusing on the facts of slavery and its consequences for the Afiican Arnerican population, Washington's Tuskegee realism (named aker the town of Washington's birth) focused on slavery "as a concept capable of effecting change, of making a ciifference ultimately in what white people thought of black people as fieedmen, not slaves": "The facts of slavery . . . are not so much what happened then- bad though it was-as what makes things, good UUngs, happen now" (Andrews, "Slavery" 68). Washington reacted to the "tuni-of-the-century American 'scientific' racism, which stereotyped 'the Negro as degraded, ignorant, incompetenf and servile" with the assertion that slavery was not "a condition of deprivation and degradation," but "a period of training and testing, from which the slave graduated with high honors and even higher ambitions" (Andrews, "Slavery " 69). Tuskegee realisrn is espoused in washingtonls Up From Slavery (1901) which emphasizes the oppomuiities to be gained from the circumstances of slavery, as opposed to the "questionhg consciousness of the former slave" expressed in the antebellum slave narrative, Le., Frederick Douglass' My Bondage and My Freedom (1 855) and Harriet A. Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) (Andrews, "Slavery" 73). Two books in particular, CharIes W. Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman (1899) and James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiopphy of an Ex-Colored Man (1 9 12), both intentionally undermine the objective stance claimed by Tuskegee realism; the narrators seem fictional, thereby undermining the realism of the narrators' stories (Andrews, "Slavery" 74).

2 In both Dust Tracks on a Road and Their Eyes Were Watching God, there are hints and half-discussions of racial issues, but they are never fully developed because Hurston's status as a writer depends on her acquiescence to the dernands of her readership. In the case of the first edition of Dust Tracks on a Road, the final three chaptersdWMyPeople, My People!," "The Inside Light-Being a Salute to Friendship." and "Seeing the World As It 1s"-were excluded altogether because their discussion of racial issues was considered provocative. In the second edition, they are included as an appendiv to the original published version (Braxton, Black Women Writing 146).

3 In his 1943 review of Dust Tracks on a Road E. Edward Farrison wrote, "'This is not a great autobiography, but it is a worthwhile book'" (Braxton, Black Wornen Writing 146). Edith Cobb said of the book that it fails to sustain the spontaneous 'creative imagination of childhood' [although] there are momentary glimmers of . . . "individual genius" experiencing "a sense of discontinuity, an awareness of Per] own unique separateness and identiîy and also a continuity." (Braxton, Black Women WritUig 146)

A possible source for the revolutionary battle to reclaim tribal lands and hold ont0 the tradition of FGM as a means of rnaintaining cultural identity in Possessing the Secret of Joy is Ngugi Wa Thiong'o's novel The River Between. Ngugi indicates that the brothers of the Kenyan Gikuyu tnbe "are mistaken in viewing circumcision as a still unsullied source of cultural integrity fkom which men& can be drawn in preparation for the battles ahead, to repossess the land. . . . For without rernoval of the clitoris, without 'purity', it is assumed that female sexual energy would threaten the tribe with destruction . " (Levin, "Women as Scapegoats" 21 1). Works Cited

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